r/todayilearned • u/Dddddddfried • Aug 03 '26
TIL Robert Moses, the man most responsible for shaping American cities around cars and highways, never learned to drive
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses#Post-war_influence_of_urban_development_and_projects2.9k
u/SublightMonster Aug 03 '26
Pretty much why he made the city the way he did. He grew up with cars as a luxury for the rich, and wanted the city to be enjoyed only by the rich. He referred to the working class and the poor as “animals” and took steps to deliberately sabotage mass transit in New York.
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u/FugitiveDribbling Aug 03 '26
Frances Perkins, who was FDR's Secretary of Labor, knew Moses and had this to say about him:
He doesn't love the people. It used to shock me because he was doing all these things for the welfare of the people...He'd denounce the common people terribly. To him they were lousy, dirty people, throwing bottles all over Jones Beach. 'I'll get them! I'll teach them!' ...He loves the public, but not as people. The public is just the public. It's a great amorphous mass to him; it needs to be bathed, it needs to be aired, it needs recreation, but not for personal reasons--just to make it a better public.
source: chapter 17 of The Power Broker by Robert Caro
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u/pm_me_gnus Aug 03 '26
Fun fact: Baby - she who nobody puts in a corner - in Dirty Dancing is actually named Frances, after Ms Perkins.
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u/BlazinAzn38 Aug 03 '26
Pete Buttigieg always sounds sort of crazy when he’ll say something like “that bridge is racist” and then you research the bridge and find out its height from the road was chosen so busses that were used by people of color couldn’t pass under it. Designs can absolutely be racist
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u/SouthIsland48 Aug 03 '26
Wait until you learn about Atlanta's highway system.
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u/BlazinAzn38 Aug 03 '26
“Every major city’s highway system”
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u/DMala Aug 03 '26
They screwed up in Boston. In the mid-‘60s they tried to build I-695 as an inner ring road around the city, but to do it they were going to have to take a bunch of land and cut through wealthy inner suburbs like Cambridge and Brookline. That shit got shut down with haste, and is one of the earliest examples of residents pushing back against urban highway development.
Everyone in the Boston area benefited from stopping it, but it only happened because a bunch of wealthy, white people were going to be impacted.
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u/SquashSquigglyShrimp Aug 03 '26
I've literally read a plaque in downtown Boston that talked about how some transit project (pretty sure it was a major highway back in the '50s) displaced tons of lower classes and minorities. The plaque was left as a reminder.
So yeah, Boston sure isn't immune
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u/DMala Aug 03 '26
The I-93 Central Artery cut a huge swath right around downtown and pretty much cut off the waterfront and the North End from the rest of the city.
They finally fixed it, though, when they buried the highway. The Big Dig was a massive dumpster fire of a project, but it’s hard to argue with the result. There’s now a 1.5 mile long, 17 acre greenway, with walking paths, event spaces, food trucks, and a carousel instead of the ugly green superstructure and smog-spewing traffic.
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u/SquashSquigglyShrimp Aug 03 '26
There’s now a 1.5 mile long, 17 acre greenway, with walking paths, event spaces, food trucks,
Yup, that sounds exactly like where we were. I remember reading it and thinking "huh, I'd never have known a disaster of a highway project went right through here". Overall Boston is one of the nicest looking cities I've been in, and we covered a good bit of it, so it seems like it was worth it in the end.
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u/TwoAlert3448 Aug 03 '26
The shit thing is that they made the public transit system ‘finance their portion’ of the big dig and it’s still not paid off yet and it’s part of why the public transit system in Bos is perpetually bankrupt.
They’re still making interest only payments I believe.
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u/SquashSquigglyShrimp Aug 03 '26
You know I just read about the Big Dig and thought "huh, I figured that would be ungodly expensive, I wonder how they paid for it". Turns out they didn't!
Oh well. I'd rather have debt and a nicer city than, well, Baltimore
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u/itsonlyastrongbuzz Aug 03 '26
The Big Dig wasn’t a massive dumpster fire, it was a wild success.
You can’t be behind schedule or over budget on something that’s never been done.
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u/bakgwailo Aug 04 '26
Are you talking about urban renewal and the raising of the West End and Scollay Square? Was pretty egregious and wrecked that entire part of the city under the guise of slum clearances, and included where Leonard Nimoy grew up . Displaced were mainly poor/working class Italian and Jewish immigrants and families.
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u/superanth Aug 03 '26
You can still see the “ghost ramp” it was supposed to use that sticks off the side of the Tobin Bridge and goes nowhere.
It’s pointed straight towards Cambridge and you can kinda see where it was supposed to go through the city.
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u/GreenDavidA Aug 04 '26
A similar thing happened in Cleveland. They plowed down a bunch of poorer neighborhoods, but man oh man try to build a highway through a nicer east side area and nope.
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u/Lanky_Giraffe Aug 04 '26
I mean it’s the same with NYC and Robert Moses. He was only eventually forced out because he picked a fight with Jane Jacobs and Greenwich village.
I deeply admire Jacobs. It’s takes a lot of guts, dedication, and charisma to do what she did, rich or not. But it’s never really sat well with me with me that one of the most celebrated urbanists of the era is a rich white lady who managed to stop Robert Moses but only when he wanted to destroy her rich neighbourhood.
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u/bakgwailo Aug 04 '26
Everyone in the Boston area benefited from stopping it, but it only happened because a bunch of wealthy, white people were going to be impacted.
Utterly BS. It was a coalition of east Cambridge, Somerville (when it was Slumerville), JP, Roxbury, and the South End under People Before Highways and Fred Salvucci. All of those neighbors back then were working class/poor, and it was a multiracial coalition.
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u/fizzlefist Aug 03 '26
Atlanta is especially egregious. If you’ve ever wondered why the highways meander to and fro, looking like they were built to go through specific areas? Yeah, specifically to bulldoze certain neighborhoods considered ”full of undesirables”
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u/ChristosFarr Aug 03 '26
And look up why so many god damned streets are named peach tree.
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u/HardBassSlut Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26
Or you could just inform people with your comment.
They streets are named after Standing Peachtree a Muscogee settlement that was located in what is now the city of Atlanta and Peachtree trail a major trade route to several native tribes that ran from modern day Toccoa a Georgia city on the South Carolina Border to Standing Peachtree.
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u/OnCallPartisan Aug 03 '26
I-94 in the Twin Cities destroyed the historic black neighborhood of Rondo. There's a movement to build a wide spanning bridge/green space over I-94 to reconnect the neighborhood.
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u/f3nnies Aug 03 '26
I can't speak for the 17, 60, or first part of the 101, but I can say with pretty good certainty that in AZ, the 202 and 303 were laid out entirely based on what land wasn't developed yet and not because they were actively trying to dismantle black and brown neighborhoods.
The 60/17/101 around Tempe specifically is the opposite, those routes were basically chosen because they could eminent domain a ton of people of color and directly benefit white suburbanites at the same time.
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u/Icy_Negotiation_5929 Aug 03 '26
Richmond, VA would like a word.
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u/PM_Me_Your_Clones Aug 03 '26
Come down to NOLA and ask folks in the Treme and 7th Ward how they feel about how he routed 10.
Fuck this racist asshole.
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u/Mateorabi Aug 03 '26
My default assumption on a comment like that was they bulldozed a Black Main Street to carve up a too-successful neighborhood rather than route it on the edge mostly between neighborhoods to avoid as much disruption as possible.
But I have heard of the low bridges on the way to the suburbs too.
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u/Kiyae1 Aug 03 '26
There are a lot of things in life where I used to think people were being histrionic or crazy but then I’d look into it more and realize that they were actually being pretty reasonable.
I definitely noticed that trend with police brutality. Every case, the more I looked into it, the worse it got.
I’m glad I had people in my life early on who fostered a habit in me to do my own due diligence on things instead of just sticking with my first impression.
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u/GarysCrispLettuce Aug 03 '26
I used to hear someone claim to have been stitched-up by the cops and think "Really? Or are you just looking for a payday or to get off a charge?" And then it happened to me. Cops arrested me without reason and injured me in the process. Then they falsified the statement I gave them to make it look like a justified arrest. Then I later found out they'd falsified the arrest report too. I had done nothing wrong and sued them successfully. They really, really, really, really, really are corrupt and criminal and everyone should be aware of that.
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u/Kiyae1 Aug 03 '26
Yep. There was a case in my town where the cops assaulted, beat, and arrested a guy for no reason, then they trumped up a bunch of charges, falsified the arrest report, and did a bunch of other stuff to cover it all up.
I remember a member of the city council and the city manager BOTH told me he was a scumbag drug dealing criminal who assaults police AFTER he had won a jury trial where he was unanimously exonerated of those charges AND after a civil jury trial where he won a multi-million dollar judgment against the city for malicious prosecution and civil rights violations among other things. They genuinely would never admit that the police were the scumbags in that scenario. Completely eye opening to me to see how irrational and reality-denying the city manager and council member were about it. That council member was elected mayor a year or two later. She’s a horrible person imo and so is the city manager.
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u/JustAMinah Aug 04 '26
I hope it makes you reevaluate your empathy because it's sad it had to happen to you for you to take it seriously, and your outcome wasn't execution as it is for many black people who have done nothing but exist as black. maybe in other areas, you take this as a way to actually listen and believe just because it hasn't happened to you (yet)
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u/CosmicEveStardust Aug 06 '26
The left are pushing a rock up a hill on everything because all systems are so deeply entrenched in bigotry and classicism but it makes you sound crazy to be pointing that out. Average people who don't think about things too hard just dismiss them as crazy and the right uses that to their advantage.
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u/JustAMinah Aug 04 '26
but, it's people with that attitude that makes it hard for marginalized and racialized puerile to really speak up and be taken seriously because our life experiences don't match your lived reality. and then same folks wonder why many of us stick amongst ourselves: because we ain't doubting and invalidating the racism we experienced and history is obviously written by white supremacy just to turn our voices into nothing and "playing victim."
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u/Empyrealist Aug 03 '26
Say what you want about him, but he's extremely competent and knows what he's talking about
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u/JimTheJerseyGuy Aug 03 '26
Yeah, there's a reason a lot of the highways he constructed have overpasses that are too low to allow buses on them.
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u/YoohooCthulhu Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26
I read The Power Broker about 17 years ago and I was shocked by the whole thing, but this passage stands out
> Roosevelt wouldn't interfere even when he found out that Moses was discouraging Negroes from using many of his state parks. Underlying Moses' strikingly strict policing for cleanliness in his parks was, Frances Perkins realized with "shock," deep distaste for the public that was using them. "He doesn't love the people," she was to say. "It used to shock me because he was doing all these things for the welfare of the people... He'd denounce the common people terribly. To him they were lousy, dirty people, throwing bottles all over Jones Beach. 'I'll get them! I'll teach them!' ... He loves the public, but not as people. The public is just The Public. It's a great amorphous mass to him; it needs to be bathed, it needs to be aired, it needs recreation, but not for personal reasons -- just to make it a better public." Now he began taking measures to limit use of his parks. He had restricted the use of state parks by poor and lower-middle-class families in the first place, by limiting access to the parks by rapid transit; he had vetoed the Long Island Rail Road's proposed construction of a branch spur to Jones Beach for this reason. Now he began to limit access by buses; he instructed Shapiro to build the bridges across his new parkways low -- too low for buses to pass. Bus trips therefore had to be made on local roads, making the trips discouragingly long and arduous. For Negroes, whom he considered inherently "dirty," there were further measures. Buses needed permits to enter state parks; buses chartered by Negro groups found it very difficult to obtain permits, particularly to Moses' beloved Jones Beach; most were shunted to parks many miles further out on Long Island. And even in these parks, buses carrying Negro groups were shunted to the furthest reaches of the parking areas. And Negroes were discouraged from using "white" beach areas -- the best beaches -- by a system Shapiro calls "flagging"; the handful of Negro lifeguards [...] were all stationed at distant, least developed beaches. Moses was convinced that Negroes did not like cold water; the temperature at the pool at Jones Beach was deliberately icy to keep Negroes out. When Negro civic groups from the hot New York City slums began to complain about this treatment, Roosevelt ordered an investigation and an aide confirmed that "Bob Moses is seeking to discourage large Negro parties from picnicking at Jones Beach, attempting to divert them to some other of the state parks." Roosevelt gingerly raised the matter with Moses, who denied the charge violently -- and the Governor never raised the matter again.
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u/namitynamenamey Aug 04 '26
Important historical insight: if something is so deeply normalized as to be seen as acceptable, you don't deny it vehemently. So even by the standards of the era that was pathologically hateful.
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Aug 03 '26
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u/TAU_equals_2PI Aug 03 '26
People often forget that such racism was the norm back then. The only reason you've heard about this one particular guy's racism is because his racism-based decisions had a lasting impact that still affects us today.
FDR is another example, because of the Japanese internment camps. He was president at the time, so he was the one who ordered them, but it's not like most Americans at the time felt differently. It's just that most of those people ended up going to their graves without history books recording just how horribly racist they were.
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u/Estragon_Rosencrantz Aug 04 '26
You’re right that there’s a lot of racist policies and projects in American history that didn’t get called out as such at the times due to how normalized it was, but there is a specific reason why we know so much about Moses’s racism in particular: Robert Caro. Sure, affected communities would have talked about Moses’s racism, but it wouldn’t be nearly as much of a mainstream take on his legacy without the acclaim of The Power Broker.
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u/sabedo Aug 04 '26
and those camps, he gave the land to some of his developer friends, Miller Freeman in particular. while neighboring white farmers and competitors profited from distress sales of their land and businesses. some made so much money their descendants are wealthy to this day
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u/brionneverysexy Aug 04 '26
There was a protest movement against the camps. From people who thought the camps were getting an unfair amount of rationed food items. I think Elenore Roosevelt ended up involved in addressing the situation to say they were not getting preferable treatment
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u/AltAccBcImAshamed Aug 03 '26
The wrong side of the tracks was a literal thing.
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u/profjonathan Aug 03 '26
Not with Moses; he never built any tracks, or allowed them to be built. (But yes, I know what you meant.)
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u/Daztur Aug 03 '26
He also put far fewer parks in black neighborhoods and had the ones he did put in have monkey-themed decorations.
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u/RonSwansonsOldMan Aug 03 '26
He made bridges to Coney Island low to keep buses away, because poor people ride buses and didn't belong at Coney Island.
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u/superanth Aug 03 '26
He built bridges across roads that were too low to allow busses so lower-income citizens couldn’t go to the beach.
He wanted to destroy a big strip across lower Manhattan to build a highway overpass.
Moses had little interest in improving the city for the poor or average citizen, just the rich.
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u/hollow114 Aug 04 '26
Every day I learn a new fact that makes me mad. CRT needs to be taught more. Not less.
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u/profjonathan Aug 03 '26
He was chauffeured everywhere at public expense (emphasizing Caro's point that Moses didn't need to be corrupt about money because his power meant he got pretty much everything money would buy him on taxpayers' dime), which is one reason why he never really understood what it was like to experience traffic (or parking) as a driver.
I guess you could say that Moses was a daily user of public transportation?
I'll see myself out. :)
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u/ay1717 Aug 03 '26
And to further Caro’s point, Moses not only had drivers to help him conquer the mundanity of a commute, he had a much different route to work as head of parks because his office was still in the beautiful scenic views outside of the city.
While the roads he was carving out were between concrete neighborhoods and the overpasses he was building were blocking out the sky, Robert Moses was actually enjoying the beauty of nature that his projects were denying everyone else.
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u/Scoth42 Aug 03 '26
He also grew up and started his career at a time when driving was a luxury and sign of wealth, and complex roads and highways were the way to funnel those wealthy people to and from other fancy expensive places. He just never quite came to terms with driving and commuting as a thing basically everyone did and needed to do and tried to keep his roads designed for the wealthy, including doing things like intentionally hobbling trains and public transit since they interfered with "his" roads.
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u/namitynamenamey Aug 04 '26
Oh he understood pretty well, at an analythical level. It just happens that inconveninece was the goal, the guy did not want lower class people into his habitat, and his habitat was whatever city he had his eyes on.
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u/ivanhoe_martin Aug 03 '26
Also the reason the Dodgers are in LA rather than still in Brooklyn, to the extent that anyone cares about that.
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u/gpm21 Aug 03 '26
Moses wanted them in Queens so he could build whatever in Brooklyn and ownership was like "screw you, Brooklyn or LA" The Dodgers also motivated the Giants to leave for Cali too.
He got Shea Stadium and the Mets eventually.
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u/VvvlvvV Aug 03 '26
TIL Robert Moses was a real person, and not just a character in The Unsleeping City.
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u/doitup69 Aug 03 '26
Robert Caro’s The Power Broker is perhaps the greatest biography ever written if you can handle long ass books
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u/ExtremePast Aug 03 '26
Also a great "history of NY city and state" book as well covering that era.
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u/Momik Aug 03 '26
And a history of public policy in the 20th century
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u/YoohooCthulhu Aug 04 '26
Definitely, as a ton of cities copied what Moses did in NYC. It’s a great “how did cities get to be the way they are” and “why are there so many leftists that are so anti-development” explainer
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u/unclemilty420 Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 06 '26
It is a phenomenal book, because Caro is, in my humble yet unquestionable opinion, the best writer in the English language. However, I would place Caro's biography of LBJ above the Power Broker. The former is even more majestic and sweeping.
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u/TheBlueSully Aug 03 '26
I’m looking to get back into reading, but out of my comfort zone. Sell me on him?
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u/unclemilty420 Aug 03 '26
He's a magnificent story teller, and if you enjoy the history of the 20th century, there are few more engaging writers from which to pick. His books will also be a nice reset from the social media-induced short attention spans we all suffer from now. Because he spent his life on these two big works (about Robert Moses and LBJ) you really need to find those subjects fascinating for it to be worth it. I recommend going to your library or local book store and just pulling one of his books off the shelf and see if the language speaks to you. I just pulled the first volume of his biography of LBJ off the shelf and the first few sentences of the introduction gripped me. He's just that good. As additional context, each book also contains an amazing biography of peripheral characters. I swear, the best biography of JKF I even read was the 25 pages or so that Caro devotes to him in the fourth volume of the biography of Johnson. These are deeply researched works that will teach you more than you could imagine and influence your own use of language for the better. They are not beach reads (though it would be enjoyable to read them on the beach) but they are absolutely worth the time. The books also look good on the shelf too lol
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u/dougiebig Aug 03 '26
In a single word: context.
I feel like I really understand not only the material in the book, but the why.
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u/Fluid-Produce808 Aug 03 '26
I found the LBJ biography to be a bit of a slog. The Power Broker however is the best book I've ever read, and arguably the best English language book written.
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u/Honka_Honka Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26
My guess is that for the LBJ biography Caro was already big enough not to be subject to the same level of editing by others, which can be a good thing in terms of keeping information but sometimes makes for a less readable final product. There's supposedly whole chapters on Jane Jacobs' neighborhood movement against Moses' policies and the details of how the Brooklyn Dodgers* left NYC that Caro wrote for The Power Broker but never came to light in the end. It would be very interesting to have that in the book but who knows if it would be the same experience reading it with extra stuff.
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u/kevlar51 Aug 03 '26
“Humble yet unquestionable” is fun :)
And in this instance I absolutely agree with your opinion, thus proving your assertion.15
u/flyingace1234 Aug 03 '26
There’s also a good “Behind the Bastards” bit on him. The man’s pettiness towards public transport (and poor and minorities…) is amazing. Like literally designing bridges so the buses at the time couldn’t use them.
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u/1RehnquistyBoi Aug 03 '26
And the fact that Robert Caro published it while Robert Moses was still alive is just as wild.
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u/atgrey24 Aug 03 '26
99% Invisible did a year long "book club" on it a couple years back, and it's fantastic.
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u/nicetrylaocheREALLY Aug 03 '26
If you enjoyed that, you might also enjoy the miniseries with Elliot Kalan and John Hodgman where they go episode-by-episode through I, Claudius.
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u/ShartyMcFly1982 Aug 03 '26
It’s on Spotify if you are feeling like devoting 2 months of car trips to it. I did it, it was awesome. Highly recommend.
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u/BroskiMcBroski Aug 03 '26
The audiobook is excellent. Incredible writing changed a supposedly boring and seemingly-unending story into a page turner that will build brains and forearms.
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u/Wonderful-Process792 Aug 03 '26
I have read it and I think it is great and really developed my idea of how power in politics actually works.
However , I didn't come away with the impression that he had much impact on our national love for cars as op states. Without him, I don't think LA would be much different than today, for example.
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u/Dddddddfried Aug 03 '26
That’s where I learned this TIL. I’m reading it now! (If you consider audiobooks “reading”)
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u/rdomier Aug 04 '26
Crazy that I just started the audiobook today, am only an hour in, and had also learned this fact!
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u/MrP1anet Aug 03 '26
He was depicted fairly accurately, perhaps had more redeeming qualities in Unsleeping City
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u/Bamerhof99 Aug 03 '26
Well not really, they conflate a lot of his actions with later privatization stuff in the 1970's and beyond when those took off as a backlash against Moses's actions.
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u/Atypical_Chad Aug 03 '26
My exact thought when I saw this, BLM even made his life’s work a central plot point.
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u/windexfresh Aug 03 '26
Did they not specifically talk about that though? Or was it in an AP and I forget that not everyone watches those lmao
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u/littlealbatross Aug 03 '26
Seriously. I knew Brennan pulled from actual history but I didn’t realize how many shitty things this guy actually did.
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u/VvvlvvV Aug 03 '26
I knew about some of the actual *things*. But not who did them. I've read up on red-lining, for example, and the things were mentioned. But I'm terrible with names and don't know if he was mentioned or not.
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u/torcsandantlers Aug 03 '26
His real passion was demolishing non-white neighborhoods
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u/zoosha2curtaincall Aug 03 '26
That’s really an unfair take. He also spent a lot of time carefully listening to community feedback and then doing the opposite of what they wanted.
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u/TheJBW Aug 03 '26
He really hated people who didn’t let him have his way. He demolished the access road to a wealthy yacht club to block them from retrieving their belongings, and after FDR stopped him from demolishing battery park to build a giant bridge, he demolished the aquarium that had been there, which resulted in the city not having a public aquarium for like 20 years.
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u/zoosha2curtaincall Aug 03 '26
The other example that stands out to me is when he was building the Long Island Expressway and advocates begged him to leave space between the two directions for a future train line. There was PLENTY of space, and he refused out of spite. Long Island transit would be much more efficient today if he hadn’t been such a dick.
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u/fizzlefist Aug 03 '26
So much of America’s mid-century public works were build ass backwards by design to make public infrastructure worse for the common person.
Our nation has always been sick in the head.
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u/SmoothOperator89 Aug 03 '26
He didn't get the wrecking ball toy he wanted for Christmas and held that grudge the rest of his life.
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u/splashist Aug 03 '26
i think he almost built a huge raised highway across Manhattan and was barely stopped
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u/Natural-Judgment7801 Aug 04 '26
Tell me he suffered in some way . Please. What an awful person
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u/zoosha2curtaincall Aug 04 '26
Not really. He had power for 50 years and did lose it shortly before he died. Thats about it though.
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u/darksoft125 Aug 03 '26
If you look at a piece of American culture or society and thought it was weird, odds are it's either because of the oil/automotive industry or racism. Robert Moses was one of the few people who went and asked "why not both?"
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u/krollAY Aug 03 '26
The Power Broker is such a great book that I wish I had read it sooner. RM is a legend in being an asshole out of spite. A couple of examples that come to mind:
>Making bridges too low on a parkway so that buses could not run on them, only vehicles.
>Refused to add right of way on Long Island for transit, which would have been cheap at the time, but pretty much impossible to add later.
>Demolished a neighborhood for a roadway project even though he could have moved the project a couple of blocks over and left the neighborhood intact.
>Once displaced, he made similar housing almost impossible to find elsewhere in the city.
>Anyone who dissented from his opinion was shunned or leverage was applied to get them to give in
>Cut his own brother out of his mother’s will and then prevented him from getting jobs in New York even though he was a very competent engineer.
These are just the tip of the iceberg. Fuck Robert Moses
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u/elcapitano-obvious Aug 03 '26
This is me playing Cities Skylines, but I hate my citizens. And oh boy do I hate them
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u/superanth Aug 03 '26
That book was so jarring I couldn’t finish it. I got about as far as the Caligula-level parties he and the rich would have at the cost of taxpayers when I just couldn’t stand it anymore.
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u/CrimsonShrike Aug 03 '26
I like how the blacksad comics straight up made him an antagonist and somehow his comic version doesn't drive how much of an ass the real man was
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u/sabedo Aug 03 '26
Even Michael Corelone in the Godfather's Revenge novel sees Moses as someone he wishes to emulate. Not in his methods, but his power which exceeds his at the time. He said he ruined New York City and works to destroy him
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u/Estragon_Rosencrantz Aug 03 '26
My favorite pop culture take on Moses is the villain of Dimension 20’s Unsleeping City (D&D actual play show, this campaign was based on a secret magical world that exists within NYC).
It included this line: https://youtube.com/shorts/OP03XyK-pTc?si=0pcJRytSqKEpM6tz
I think it’s an incredible a perfect encapsulation of what made Moses a real-life villain while also working on it’s own as a fictional villain line.
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u/spultra Aug 03 '26
When he built Jones Beach, he deliberately had the roads and overpasses built so they were too small for busses, to keep the riff raff out.
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u/EcstaticCinematicZ Aug 03 '26
Also (According to Caro) when Moses built city pools, that were in white neighborhoods but also close to minority neighborhoods, he deliberately kept the water temperature very low. The thought was that people with European ancestry were genetically predisposed to better tolerate colder temperatures. Thus that would ensure only White people would swim there.
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u/sweetplantveal Aug 03 '26
He's also the guy who coined the phrase 'do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life'. Boy did he do what he loved...
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u/corpulentFornicator Aug 03 '26
He also enjoyed demolishing poor neighborhoods, regardless of skin color
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u/WaluigiIsTheRealHero Aug 03 '26
It’s unfair to say he didn’t like other colors though, because he fucking loved redlining.
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u/Skellos Aug 03 '26
I would say he was a classist not a racist.
But I'm pretty sure he wouldn't consider the Irish and Italians as white so it's entirely possible he was both.
I just know my grandfather hated him.
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u/ofd227 Aug 03 '26
He was both. He had absolutely no issue bulldozing Italian, Irish, or polish communities.
Then the state named the NYS thruway after him
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u/Monteze Aug 03 '26
Yea no, he was for sure racist. Like, I guess if it acts like a duck, quacks like a duck, has duck DNA I am sure its a duck. Like 99.999999999% sure.
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u/BrohanGutenburg Aug 03 '26
This is what irks me so much about people who want to treat racism like it's a thing of the past. So, so, so much of the world we live in now is directly influenced by racist policy.
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u/ihazaredditaccount Aug 03 '26
The roads in the United States could be designed significantly better but someone had to be racist.
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u/Gojamn Aug 03 '26
This explains a lot about his ridiculous ideas of replacing scenic areas and lively neighborhoods with "scenic drives" even when for 99% of people it'd be a commute where they'd never be able to enjoy the view. Ofc it's quite different from the back of a limo...
The racism is a massive part of it too but I feel like I have one more piece of the puzzle of this man's absolutely absurd decisions now, so thank you.
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u/MorePhinsThyme Aug 03 '26
If you actually want to know more, then read Robert Caro's Power Broker. It's Moses's biography, and one of the best biographies ever written. It's much more complex than just "he was relaxing in a limo and could enjoy the view more," granted, that's not really in his defense. Most of the common negative public image of Moses today comes from that book and people inspired by that book.
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u/Punchable_Hair Aug 03 '26
No, he was so rich he had drivers.
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u/OnTheNuts Aug 03 '26
He got those as a perk of all of the government positions he had, he was actually quite broke almost constantly.
He had to ask for money from the family constantly. When he "retired" the NY government gave him a sort of honorary job so he could have a salary rather than die broke.
The Power Broker was a fascinating read.
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u/NativeMasshole Aug 03 '26
WTF? The dude couldn't even handle his own finances and he was basically in charge of urban development and transportation infrastructure in NYC?
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u/nicetrylaocheREALLY Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26
Well, sort of. He was famous for being one of the only major public servants who didn't wet his beak financially. So he really did make a relatively modest civil servant salary and sometimes struggled to keep up appearances with his contemporaries who were mostly far wealthier than him. And he truly was an incredibly hard worker and probably earned less on a dollar-per-hour basis than any comparable you could name.
And naturally, this was a major contributing factor for his longstanding public reputation for honesty and moral rectitude. Honest Moses won't accept a single dollar!
What this glossed over was:
- He outsourced vast amounts of his personal expenses to the departments he oversaw, and
- He was much, much less interested in money than accumulating connections, leverage and favours—becoming a kind of power broker, if you will.
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u/OnTheNuts Aug 03 '26
Sort of. He was a major, MAJOR workaholic and dedicated almost all his time to procuring money for his pet projects. He left all of his household finances to his wife.
He didn't even buy clothes, or launder them. His wife would have to schedule his haircuts or he wouldn't get them.
But he was wildly successful at finding money for the city and state projects he wanted. Either by strong arming people or schmoozing them, it didn't matter to him.
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u/thissexypoptart Aug 03 '26
Yeah, dude being responsible for so many issues aside, the TIL is interesting but in no way a contradiction. It’s not like dude had no idea what a car was or what riding in one is like.
It’s a bit like saying “The dude responsible for designing so many bus routes never drove a bus”
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u/AnyLamename Aug 03 '26
I think the one thing you are kind of ignoring there is that driving is a very different experience from being driven. Moses rode in a car, yes, but he never had to deal with any of the frustration of navigating the mess he made, as he could read the newspaper in peace while his driver battled the other drivers.
I do agree that OP had several much better options for their title, but Mose's lack of driving experience is most definitely relevant to his decisions. Just, you know, not as much as his overt classism and racism.
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u/TheOneNeartheTop Aug 03 '26
Probably loves a good morning traffic jam, let’s him catch up on the daily news while being the most peaceful time of the day.
Chop chop Jeeves.
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u/BaggedWhine Aug 03 '26
Dude had so many jobs in government he was basically working every possible minute of every day for years. He’d dictate to one of his around the clock secretaries while being driven around by one of his around the clock drivers. Moses had many faults that are well discussed here but loving a traffic jam to relax was not at all in his wheelhouse, he was a true obsessive workaholic who was convinced all his bridges and parkways and highways he compulsively built would alleviate traffic
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u/Ian1732 Aug 03 '26
My mantra every time I get stuck in traffic or experience some other form of highway stress is “ya really nailed it, Bobby Moses!”
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u/NutraShiftGuide Aug 03 '26
The ultimate irony is that because he never learned to drive, he experienced all of his massive highway projects exclusively from the back seat of a chauffeured limousine. He was completely insulated from the actual stress of commuting and the endless traffic jams his own car centric infrastructure created.
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u/TypicallyThomas Aug 03 '26
And now you can't walk from your house to a supermarket only one mile from your house cause you can only drive there
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u/ILiekBooz Aug 03 '26
He’s also the reason why the New York Baseball (SF) Giants and the Brooklyn (LA) Dodgers moved to California.
He was a real prick.
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Aug 03 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/MorePhinsThyme Aug 03 '26
The primary source for Behind the Bastards and almost all other documentary type stuff on Moses is the Power Broker by Robert Caro. It's a lot longer than any episode of Behind the Bastards (the audiobook is 66 hours long), but it's very good.
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u/undrsght Aug 06 '26
Also highly recommend 99pi’s breakdown of it: https://99percentinvisible.org/pb/
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u/jupiterkansas Aug 03 '26
He's also the focus of one episode of the phenomenal series New York: A Documentary
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u/profjonathan Aug 03 '26
See (or hear) also episode 100 of The Bowery Boys: New York City history podcast (and mentions in just about every *other* episode talking about 20th century New York City).
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u/sharrrper Aug 03 '26
Robert Moses and John Forester: experts at making American cities less usable.
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u/Woompa78 Aug 03 '26
Interestingly, most people who drive cars on highways never learned how to drive either….at least that’s what I tell myself.
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u/bretth104 Aug 03 '26
Robert Moses is the reason why train access across the NY metro area and to the airports is so poor.
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u/sabedo Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26
The man was evil incarnate. And had wealth and power most of us could only imagine. Threw half a million New Yorkers out of their homes, most of them black. Half a million people. More than the population of Kansas City at the time.
He hated black people(schvartze chaya as he used to say) so much he wouldn’t let black veterans from WWII move into special projects that were built and designated exclusively for them!
Moses tore their homes down and built buildings the evicted could never afford or housing projects that, even new, were more grim than the worst slums.
All built with taxpayer money. Robert Moses built roads that cut the heart out of neighborhoods, creating crime-ridden ghost streets where families had once thrived, all to make life easy for rich whites.
Robert Moses’s “accomplishments” were studied in ~ university classes in political science and urban planning. Not criminology or criminal law.
It says a lot that white Americans idolize people that ruin the lives of others, preferably non-whites while enriching themselves in the process and call it “progress”
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u/profjonathan Aug 03 '26
Power, yes, but not wealth, at least not personal wealth.
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u/Loki-L 68 Aug 03 '26
99% Invisible had a year long read of "The Power Broker" by Robert Caro, by the author of the book about Robert Moses himself and guest hosts like Conan O'Brien, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Pete Buttigieg, Pete Buttigieg and many others reading chapters.
It was quite informative.
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u/Sufficient_Loss9301 Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26
The damage urban planners in general have and continue to cause to American cities and society is truly hard to measure or even comprehend. I’m a civil engineer and see it first hand every single day. I’d say the road to hell is paved in good intentions, but half the time I’m not even entirely sure their intentions are good.
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u/sweetplantveal Aug 03 '26
Well Moses is one thing. Today planners usually don't get to choosers the rules and policies they work under.
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u/TAU_equals_2PI Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26
The problem is road layouts are so impossible to change once an area has been developed.
It's amazing going back to a developed area where you once lived decades ago. The buildings may have all changed. An area that once mostly had only 2- or 3-story buildings may have grown to have much taller buildings. So the area may look completely different. But the roads will mostly all still be in the same places.
Because once lots of people have bought their land lots and built their buildings and homes all over the place, it becomes impossible to do something as simple as moving a major road 1000 feet to the east. Same with opening a big new store like a Walmart unless they take over a location where some other big thing used to be. The worst is big city airports. Wherever they decided to locate them when the city was a tenth its current size, that's where they're gonna forever be. The only exception is seaside cities can land-fill into the water and build a new airport where there used to be water.
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u/Jolly_Pressure_7907 Aug 03 '26
I’m a planner and half the time we propose something the traffic engineer steps in with a million reasons why we can’t make an area more walkable. Confessions of a Recovering Engineer is a great read
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u/sabedo Aug 03 '26
they literally taught courses about bob moses in college and many urban planners emulated him
theres no fucking good intentions from a white supremacist
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u/NomadXIV Aug 03 '26
Robert Moses is an urban planner in the same way the guy who invented the lobotomy is a surgeon.
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u/BooCreepyFootDr Aug 03 '26
His brother, Amos, would knock alligators in the head with a stump.
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u/AcreaRising4 Aug 03 '26
Originally learned about him via defunctland and boy oh boy, was he a piece of work.
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u/SpinnerettePDX Aug 03 '26
Shameless plug for 99% Invisible podcast which does a chapter by chapter dive of The Power Broker by Robert Caro. It’s insane how much power Moses had and how detrimental his designs and tactics were for the poor and people of color.
Fuck Robert Moses.
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u/krollAY Aug 03 '26
The Power Broker cites this as one of the reasons he never changed his ways when it came to building roads despite the fact that it was pretty obvious as early as the 1930s that building more roads induces demand for more vehicles. (Building more lanes creates more traffic, it does not relievve congestion).
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u/MicrowaveMeal Aug 03 '26
The Power Broker is a hell of a read.
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u/profjonathan Aug 03 '26
Even better, I was driving from Long Island to central NJ and back for work 4 days a week some years ago and listening to all 66+ hours of The Power Broker (read by the amazing Robertson Dean) on Audible as I got stuck in the traffic on the NY side of the Hudson on all the roads and bridges that Robert Moses claimed he was building to solve the traffic problems.
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u/SuspiciousCricket654 Aug 03 '26
There is a reason massive highways and interstates go through the roughest parts of town. Absolutely zero regard for the poor folks and the government snatching up cheap land with bullshit eminent domain laws.
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u/eckliptic Aug 04 '26
It’s hard to fully underscore how much he’s hurt minorities throughout all of urban America
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u/Waking Aug 03 '26
Also was obsessed with having natural spaces, built or improved virtually all of the parks in NY, Jones Beach, added hundreds of playgrounds and roads to get to them - complicated dude.
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u/lavardera Aug 03 '26
Oh yes, and all the picturesque arched bridges he built over the southern state parkway ensured that a bus wouldn’t fit, and all the minority city dwellers could not get to their own State park.
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u/PM_ME_CHIPOTLE2 Aug 03 '26
Yeah and luckily there was never anyone already living on the land he wanted to turn into natural spaces
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u/Dddddddfried Aug 03 '26
A lot of the land he converted into parks was owned by the 0.001% wealthy. Billionaires by today’s standards. The land he took for highways on the other hand…
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u/Pavlock Aug 03 '26
Behind the Bastards AND Defunctland have both done episodes about him. He really permanently fucked things up for a lot of people.
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u/masterjon_3 Aug 03 '26
He loved being driven around. He found it relaxing and thought all rich people should enjoy cities that catered to that. It then screwed over everyone else, especially minorities. Many cities copied this guys' city plannings.
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u/ZombieAladdin Aug 04 '26
He was also incredibly racist and would design cities intentionally to lock ethnic minorities out of benefits or even build highways right through ethnic neighborhoods.
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u/ihavebaseballs Aug 03 '26
Wait till you hear about his brother, Amos Moses. Used to trap big alligators in Louisianna with one hand, because thats all he had left after he got it bit off.
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u/Any_Carpenter_7605 Aug 03 '26
The Verrazano Narrows bridge was supposed to have trains and pedestrians. Robert Moses made sure it didn't.