Despite modern politicians’ insistence on using the book as a political compass (in addition to Adams, his mayoral challengers Brad Lander and Jessica Ramos cite its influence), we are living not in the world of Robert Moses but in the one that arose in his absence. The federal interest in cities was already dead by the time Joe Biden entered the Senate; it is the seesaw of disinvestment and private capital, not overpowering government intervention, that has determined the shape of the urban landscape since. “We’ve transferred our rage about Moses to that corporatized development without fully understanding that Moses offers a more complex picture,” said Samuel Zipp, a historian at Brown University and author of another urban renewal history, Manhattan Projects.
The prototypical modern city planner, meanwhile, is closer to Leslie Knope (a character invented, ironically, by a Power Broker superfan), wielding little influence. Beginning in the 1980s, many critics began to say that Caro had been too critical of Moses’ wily, imperious way of getting things done. Don’t those big plans look tempting now, as New York—and the nation—struggles to construct vital infrastructure from high-speed rail and subways to wind farms and transmission lines, and cities stagnate under a blanket of restrictive zoning, cynically deployed environmental law, and suburban community control? What tools do we have to confront the climate crisis?
“In an era when almost any project can be held up for years by public hearings and reviews by community boards, community groups, civic groups, and planning commissions, not to mention the courts, it is hard not to feel a certain nostalgic tug for Moses’s method of building by decree,” the architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote in 2007. “It may not have been democratic, or even right. Still, somebody has to look at the big picture and make decisions for the greater good.”
Caro’s suspicion of the government’s ability to do good is another product of its post-Watergate, post-Vietnam, post–Great Society moment, argues Jacob Anbinder, a historian and fellow at Cornell University working on a book about the origins of the housing affordability crisis. “The book is absolutely dripping with a very particular kind of 1970s liberal suspicion of centralized political power,” he wrote to me. “Insofar as people use The Power Broker as a guide to inform their own political values today, I think there is a risk of overextending its lessons. It makes no more sense to assume The Power Broker explains New York today any more than it would’ve for New Yorkers in the ’70s to think The Gangs of New York offered trenchant insights about Abe Beame.”
