Attentive readers may have noticed that I listed Robert Caro's The Power Broker among the books I was currently reading for most of 2024, and that was true.
It's about 1,200 pages long, and I read it off and on until I finished it about a month ago. I was keeping ahead of the 99% Invisible podcast, which has been featuring the book periodically to run down the action of a chapter or two, and talk with a guest about the book. It was a great year and I'm glad I read it. I think my earlier encounter with the book — in a college class my freshman year — was only some of the chapters.
One of those chapters, though, is the one called "One Mile." It tells the story of Moses's decision to build the Cross Bronx Expressway through the East Tremont neighborhood, and particularly to wipe out a series of working class apartment buildings that housed people who had formerly lived on the Lower East Side.
It's a chapter that makes the reader want to cry and scream in frustration, because the people of East Tremont figured out how to fight back, despite having no political know-how or connections. And they should have won, but like everyone who fought Moses until he finally loses power when he was nearing 80… they lost.
Today, Michael Leddy at Orange Crate Art posted a 1939–1941 tax photo of two of the buildings that Robert Moses destroyed, as well as the surrounding area. These are among the 159 buildings Moses destroyed on a whim, which housed 1,530 families.
All so people in cars could get somewhere faster, in theory…but as soon as anything Moses built was done, it became jammed full and nothing moved, because the iron law of induced demand meant "just one more lane would fix it."
Destroying a community in the city to build the suburbs, while making the city's residents pay for it.
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