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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now, we continue our WNYC centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things. It's Thing 22 today and it's kind of a two for one. 100 years of Robert Moses, the iconic urban planner who designed so much of New York's infrastructure for better and for worse, and 50 years of The Power Broker, the iconic book about Robert Moses written by Robert Caro.

Robert Moses grew up in New Haven and Manhattan 110 years ago in 1914. He earned a doctorate in political science from Columbia. He started out in public life as an idealist and a reformer 100 years ago in 1924. Governor Al Smith appointed Moses to several positions overseeing parks, including president of the Long Island State Park Commission. In that year, 1924, 100 years ago, Robert Moses conceived of building Jones Beach. He talked about it in a 1959 interview. I think this is from NBC News in a series titled Manufacturing Intellect.

Robert Moses: Now, you take a thing like projects like Jones Beach, for example. Well, we've been at Jones Beach since 1924. That's a long time. The original plan is no different from the present plan. We've carried out about maybe 70% of it, 75% of it in the course of 35 years. That's how long it's taken. It just happens to be our good fortune or luck or whatever you may call it that the people who originally conceived the idea are still around. They're extant and maybe a little groggy, but they're still here.

Brian Lehrer: "A little groggy, but they're still here." In a way, that little clip of Robert Moses sets the scene for the larger story. He had big ideas for redesigning New York, Jones Beach, and lots of other stuff. He figured out how to stay in power, still here for a really long time. Here's another clip from that 1959 interview in which he talks about urban planning generally. You can hear his extreme confidence in himself, or maybe this sounds like arrogance.

Robert Moses: My experience has been that many of the people, by no means all, who call themselves planners are people who make pretty pictures. They draw things. They present a plausible and often melodramatic program, but they're not people that get anything done. Many of them are entirely satisfied when they finish the plan, when they've announced the plan, that's the end of it, because they don't have the stick to it in this. They don't have the guts. They don't have the ability to combat, to fight in the forum, to get things accomplished.

Brian Lehrer: Robert Moses in 1959. We've got a few more very revealing clips from that video to play and this one of Robert Caro, the journalist who wrote the book about Robert Moses. The book called The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. The Power Broker is now celebrating its 50th anniversary and still is an incredibly prominent and influential work of biography and New York political analysis. Caro summed up Moses' legacy the way he sees it this way to NY1's Errol Louis.

Robert Caro: Certainly, Robert Moses was great at getting big things built, right? He built, with the single exception of the FDR Drive, every parkway and expressway that you drive on. He built all the bridges since 1931, all parks, etcetera. What I wrote in The Power Broker, the epigraph, the sentence at the beginning of the book, Errol, is a quote from Sophocles. It says, "One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been." When Robert Moses left office after 44 years in absolute power, the city was really in chaos.

Brian Lehrer: Robert Caro speaking with Errol Louis, political anchor for Spectrum News NY1, who joins us now as our guest for this edition of 100 Years of 100 Things. Errol has a new episode of his podcast called You Decide out today about The Power Broker at 50. That includes that clip. Errol, always good to have you on usually to talk about current events, today, to talk about 100 years of current events that still shape New York City and the whole area today. Welcome back to WNYC.

Errol Louis: Always great to be with you, Brian. This, of course, is both about the past but also very much about the present.

Brian Lehrer: Absolutely. Listeners, we invite your oral histories or any other comments, questions, or stories, and about the present. Listeners, do you see the legacy of Robert Moses, for better or worse, in your neighborhood today or anywhere in your New York life? 212-433-WNYC. Do you see the legacy of Robert Moses, for better or worse, in your neighborhood today or anywhere in your New York life?

212-433-WNYC. Call or text, 212-433-9692, or we'll give you another option of a way to chime in here. If you read The Power Broker, what stays with you about that book or how did it influence your worldview? If you read The Power Broker at any time in its 50 years of existence, what stays with you about that book or how did it influence you in any way or with any other comments, questions, or a story? Call or text, 212-433-WNYC.

Errol, the clip we played from your podcast of Robert Caro begins to set the scene. Robert Moses did so much to design the New York we know today, but his legacy, for better or worse, who he helped and who he hurt is very mixed. Can you start with the first half of that? How much Robert Moses' infrastructure, parks, highways, anything else we use today, mostly without thinking of him, is from him?

Errol Louis: That's exactly right. Listen, anybody, especially newcomers to New York, you want to tell them on this subject, any road that you're on that says "expressway," that's the Van Wyck Expressway, the Cross Bronx Expressway, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, those are all Robert Moses' projects. The Triborough Bridge, which was the first big project and probably the most meaningful in a way because we take it for granted that you could just drive from Queens into the Bronx or into Manhattan, but you used to have to take a boat.

That was one of his crowning achievements. In fact, that's where he had his headquarters. On any given day, you could probably find him tucked underneath the Triborough Bridge. That doesn't even begin to touch on it. There's Lincoln Center and there's the Fordham campus right behind Lincoln Center. There's the United Nations. There's a lot, a lot of projects, all of which are connected.

Brian Lehrer: The bio of Moses on the Encyclopedia Britannica website says, "Among the works completed under his supervision were a network of 35 highways, 12 bridges, numerous parks." We'll get to the parks, which many people consider the best part of his legacy, I think. Lincoln Center, Shea Stadium, many housing projects, two hydroelectric dams, and the 1964 World's Fair, as well as it also cites the UN complex on Manhattan's East Side. Just to give listeners who are unfamiliar, an idea of the scope of his vision and influence.

In the Robert Caro clip that we played from your podcast, he cites 44 years as the length of time Moses stayed in power without being elected to anything. Is the heart of Caro's problems with Robert Moses, since it is a largely critical book, the accumulation of power itself. The book is called The Power Broker, not The Bad Urban Planner or The Destroyer of Neighborhoods or anything like that, or was it more that Moses left a legacy of damage and destruction as well as building and creation?

Errol Louis: It's interesting because there's a somewhat complicated moral voice to this book. The subtitle is Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. He's already making a judgment right up front that this has not been for the better, by and large, both due to bad urban planning concepts like always building new roads. When one road became congested, he'd build another road to alleviate the congestion.

We now know that roads are basically magnets. They are traffic attractors. Even the ones that are supposed to alleviate traffic end up getting clogged in fairly short order. Robert Caro, as an investigative reporter, finds all of that abhorrent just as a New Yorker. He's a kid from the Bronx and he sees all of these things happening. He doesn't like what's happening to the city.

He also is giving us a warning, I think, about what happens when too much power accumulates in the hands of one person. The idea that we had an unelected person who could not easily be removed because he wrote little clauses into a lot of the documents, the architecture of his power was just as complex as any bridge or road that he was responsible for. You couldn't easily undo it.

We have, I guess, taken care of that to a certain extent. The whole fact that we have all of these community boards and the Uniform Land Use Review Procedures and the fact that some now complain that we've gone too far in the other direction, that in wanting to stop any one person from becoming another Robert Moses, we've made it very hard for anybody to easily get anything built that's of any size or scope or large impact. There's a certain truth to that, for sure.

Brian Lehrer: I think Thomas in Red Hook has an example from his neighborhood of one of the things that occurs in a number of places in the city that people really, really resent about what Robert Moses did. Thomas, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Thomas: Hello. How are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good. What you got?

Thomas: Yes, I live in Red Hook. It's very apparent that Gowanus Expressway splits through Red Hook. It's almost impossible to get across Hamilton Avenue, except for a couple of overpasses. From what I know of this book and I struggled with whether Robert Moses was a genius or an evil genius because, certainly, a lot of what he did was destructive and also quite beautiful, especially Jones Beach.

It seems from his work that he was fairly racist, especially in cutting off poor neighborhoods like Red Hook, which was once the drug capital of the world, as opposed to Cobble Hill or Carroll Gardens, which are much more wealthy because of that expressway. Second Avenue under that expressway was completely destroyed from being a neighborhood extension of whatever was to the east, the neighborhoods to the east, Park Slope. Now, it's just a commercial wasteland.

Brian Lehrer: Thomas, thank you very much for that story. We're going to play a clip of Robert Moses, another one from that 1959 interview that made my head explode, Errol, when I heard it, when he addressed that kind of complaint. I want to throw one other example on there just like Thomas's. Can you talk about the Cross Bronx Expressway in particular? It comes up in your podcast as maybe the most prominent example of the ill effects of the way Robert Moses built infrastructure.

Errol Louis: Oh yes, an absolute disaster. By the way, my son went to middle and high school in Red Hook, so I actually had to cross Hamilton Avenue in that canal. It was like a mission-impossible adventure every single morning for five or six years. He's absolutely right about that. The Cross Bronx was another one of these examples and it was almost worse in some ways. The elevated Gowanus is like a big dinosaur looming over a neighborhood, spewing a lot of particulate pollution and dooming a lot of businesses.

The Cross Bronx was even worse in a way because it carved through neighborhoods. Robert Moses was determined to do it his way. In The Power Broker, they describe how neighborhood activists and residents pleaded with him to make just a small adjustment to it so as not to displace tens of thousands of families. At that point, Robert Moses was at the peak of his power, didn't want to hear it, wouldn't do it, slashed through the neighborhood, and displaced thousands upon thousands of families.

To this day, and it's very sad, there are still people, the remnants of that destruction from decades ago, who get together once in a while for a kind of a reunion to try to celebrate and in some ways memorialize what had been thriving communities. Then, of course, as a traffic proposition, I personally organized my driving in New York around avoiding the Cross Bronx at all costs. I just don't get on that road. It's a 24-hour traffic jam. Just horrible.

Brian Lehrer: My father grew up in a building that was then cleared away, that is now part of the Cross Bronx Expressway. How about Lincoln Center in that respect before we play this clip? Wonderful Lincoln Center, but it came with the displacement of many lower-income New Yorkers who had housing in that neighborhood, which was known at the time as San Juan Hill, right?

Errol Louis: That's right. San Juan Hill. It was Black and Puerto Rican and Irish. It was an integrated neighborhood in a lot of ways. It's a working-class neighborhood. There's a wonderful documentary. I believe it was actually about the Metropolitan Opera that talked about what was there and even showed some of it. They had one of these land-use fights. Again, modern New Yorkers may not be used to this idea, but there would be meetings. People would come out and they would shout. They would ask for different kind of considerations or a new plan or less disruption and so forth.

Back then, Robert Moses would stand there and he would listen. He would look down his nose at them and say, "No, we're going forward." Nothing would change. There were no compromises. There was little discussion. That was one of those casualties. Again, we look at it now. Modern planning suggests that even for a cultural arts center, disrupting the grid and making it hard to get there. Anybody who's ever had to try to walk across those big plazas to get to where you're going recognize that there's a different and a better way to do things.

Brian Lehrer: Here's that 1959 relevant clip of Robert Moses from that NBC interview in a series called Manufacturing Intellect. I could hardly believe I found this. Moses speaking directly about disrupting people and communities for what he saw as the greater good. He references what he calls Lincoln Square, I think, meaning Lincoln Center. Again, this begins with Moses, the power broker himself, referring openly to the fact that he has been in power for so long.

Robert Moses: Those of us who have been around for quite a while, and don't forget, we have survived somehow in public office, don't get excited about criticism. We try to be reasonable about it. We try to understand that you have to move a lot of people out of the way of a big housing project or slum clearance project like, say, Lincoln Square, whatever the objective may be, or out of the way of an approach to a bridge, that a lot of them are not going to like it.

Many of them are misinformed. Many of them, in the end, come around to feel that they've done them a great service. In the process, if there is somebody to excite them, to steam them up, somebody that is a ringleader, you get a terrific amount of criticism. Newspapers join in it, churches join in it, and there it is. That frightens the elected officers. They're scared. Even those that have commissioned you to do the job run out on you or they're weakened.

Brian Lehrer: Errol, that's a remarkable clip, I think, both for what it says about Robert Moses' view of disrupting communities and for his pretty casual dismissal of community opposition, dismisses churches to his plans over time when opposition did arise. Did you ever hear that one before?

Errol Louis: I had not heard that particular clip, but it certainly tracks with what we know about this man and his legacy. If you think about it and you listen to the clip carefully, he's disdaining homeowner associations, tenant groups, churches, and ultimately democracy itself in the form of elected officials. He's like, "Oh yes, of course, these people get steamed up because there's the agitators, and then they go to the politicians, and then they just want to win elections," and so forth. It's like, yes, that's pretty much the way it's supposed to work, Mr. Moses, the alternative being what? Everybody just gives over their lives, their homes, and their future to Robert Moses, who, by the way, built all of these bridges and roads and never got a driver's license, never drove a car in his life.

Brian Lehrer: Really? How about that? Let's see. Well, we're getting so many interesting calls and a number of them, I should say, you have this in your podcast too, represented by the esteemed historian of New York City, Kenneth T. Jackson, defending Moses from some of this criticism. I think we're going to get some of that from Patrick in Oak Beach, is it, Patrick? You're on WNYC. Hello.

Patrick: Yes, it is Oak Beach. Every day, I drive on Ocean Parkway enjoying everything that Moses built here from Jones Island, frankly, all the way out to Montauk. By the way, I used to be the Suffolk County executive, but I have an interesting story.

Brian Lehrer: Oh. [chuckles]

Patrick: When I first started in politics, I started working for a guy named Tom Downey, who was a Watergate baby, got elected in '74. He represented the South Shore. We were at a little cocktail party in Babylon, because that's where Moses lived, had a house there as well as in New York City, to meet Downey. Downey wanted to meet him. Tom Downey was there and he leaned over. Moses introduced himself. By the way, Moses was quite formidable. Big, strong, big chest. I remember it like it was yesterday.

Here I am, this little aide, helping him introduce to Mr. Moses. Downey says to Moses, Downey's 25-year-old congressman, "Mr. Moses, I think you'll be interested to know that I've got the first major appropriation, federal appropriation, for the Fire Island National Seashore." Moses paused and looked at him. He looked at him and said, "Excuse me? How big was that appropriation?" He said, "$11 million." Moses squinted and, again, leaned into the congressman a little bit more and said, "For those people? Those snobs from Manhattan?"

[laughter]

Patrick: "I had a plan for Fire Island to do what I did at Jones Beach, which was to open it from one end to the other, and enable the people to enjoy it and not just a handful of people who happen to have summer homes there."

Brian Lehrer: Patrick, let me read to you because this is the next piece of the conversation we're going to have-

Patrick: Sure.

Brian Lehrer: -about race and class and whether Robert Moses designed the Southern State Parkway to exclude buses because it wouldn't bring lower-income people, also read Black and brown people to Jones Beach. I'm on the Jones Beach website, the official website of Jones Beach. It says this in its history segment section.

It says, "Robert Moses, the famous 20th-century park and city planner, is a primary creator of Jones Beach. It was his vision and perseverance that made Jones Beach a reality. Jones Beach was designed for a very specific patron, the car-owning, city-dwelling middle class." That's what the Jones Beach website ascribes to Robert Moses' motivation. You as a former Suffolk County executive and fan of Moses, how does that strike you?

Patrick: Well, I think he was very much a person of his times. If you recall, we had a thing called World War II that came. All of a sudden, everything from New York, from the boroughs, everything moved to Long Island. It was all the returning veterans. Yes, that was built before. Of course, it was done at a time when, frankly, there was discrimination, sadly.

On the other hand, if you go to Jones Beach or Robert Moses or any of the other state parks, they're as diverse as the people who live in the communities today. What I see is that he made these areas accessible. They could have very easily ended up looking like Long Beach, the Rockaways, the Jersey Shore, all these other places that, frankly, sadly, have been destroyed by overdevelopment and lack of concern.

Brian Lehrer: I got you. I want to leave it there for time and get some other people on, but we really appreciate your call. Thank you very much. We're going to take a break and follow up on that little piece of the conversation and talk a little bit more about one of the things that maybe is one of the most enduring things from the book about Moses, The Power Broker, celebrating its 50th anniversary. The allegation that Moses purposely built the bridges low on the southern state to keep those buses and those poor people and people of color out and some pushback to that. That's in Errol's podcast, so stay with us. Brian Lehrer on WNYC.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we are in our WNYC centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things. Thing 22 today, kind of a twofer. 100 years of Robert Moses, the iconic urban planner, and 50 years of The Power Broker, the iconic book about Robert Moses, written by Robert Caro, Caro, C-A-R-O, if you don't know, with my guest, Errol Louis from Spectrum News NY1, political anchor there who I call the best reason to still have cable, with his Inside City Hall show Monday through Thursday and his national politics show Friday nights there and his podcast, You Decide.

The current episode of which is about 50 years of The Power Broker. In a minute, we're going to go to a caller from Milwaukee, Errol, who's reading The Power Broker right now, so that's going to be interesting. We have to talk explicitly about race and class as we started to do before the break. How does Caro primarily address it in terms of Robert Moses' feelings and policies?

Errol Louis: Look, he talks about what ended up enshrined in New York in the way of parks and barriers to parks and the roadways, the pathways, the opening up of Long Island in particular was shot through with racism. He makes a compelling case for it. As a reporter, some of those 522 interviews were with people who worked for Robert Moses. They say, "Yes, this was not a guy who was particularly open-minded about this and, in fact, not only didn't mind racial segregation but, in fact, furthered it."

Like so much of what he did, he built it in stone in ways that, decades later, we're still trying to undo. The most famous example, of course, is that of the good Robert Moses, if you want to put it that way, who opened up Long Island by building the northern and southern state parkways, as well as the Long Island Expressway, which was a very complicated process that involved getting a lot of permission from private landowners, using a lot of the landfill to actually build Jones Beach, which is one of the great beaches on the East Coast.

All of that is wonderful. According to the book, according to Caro, he talked with people who said, "Well, they specifically made those low bridges, those 8-foot, 10-foot, 11-foot clearances on those stone bridges over the northern and southern parkways to prevent regular city buses from bringing Black and brown kids or families out to the beaches that he was providing access to."

It's been a point of controversy. There are people who say that that's not necessarily true, who point out that, actually, if you're diligent enough about it, you can find your way out to the beach. Those aren't the only roads to get out there. For example, there are questions about whether or not Robert Moses really intended that. I think it's a great conversation to have and to pick through all of the evidence for and against the proposition that this master planner planned to keep the races separate.

Brian Lehrer: I guess you could take Northern Boulevard forever with all its stoplights and then go south on the Meadowbrook. On your podcast, you got some pushback on that accusation from the historian, Kenneth T. Jackson, who teaches at Columbia and is editor of The Encyclopedia of New York City. Here's that clip where he gives you an alternative explanation for the low bridges, citing the parkway's designer.

Kenneth T. Jackson: Truth is, Arnold Vollmer, who was the designer, said if he was trying to design them so buses can-- he didn't tell me and I designed them. He said Jane Jacobs didn't realize and Robert Caro didn't realize is if you raise the height of the bridges, those beautiful arch bridges, 3 feet, you just double their price. It's not like I'm just choosing to do this. It's aesthetically better and economically better.

Brian Lehrer: Errol, I don't know if you have your own take, but keep Jones Beach white and free of poor people versus keep the parkway aesthetically pleasing and affordable to build. I don't know if it'll ever be settled or maybe it is settled, but Kenneth T. Jackson is a credible source, probably without an axe to grind, but maybe so is Robert Caro.

Errol Louis: Well, look, I think it's a distinction without a difference to tell you the truth where it's like, "Well, we were just trying to save a buck." Well, yes, okay, fine. Every owner of a slave ship in the 18th century probably said the same thing, right? That doesn't make it any better and it frankly doesn't make it that much different. The point that I think Caro is getting at that runs across a lot of the different projects that he covers in the book is that either this is for the public, meaning the whole public, the whole people, or it's not. Once you start making these distinctions and saying, "Well, Fire Island is for these people and Jones Beach is for those people. The Orchard Beach up in the Bronx, another Robert Moses project, that's for another group of people."

Brian Lehrer: Being a race in class puppet master at that point.

Errol Louis: Yes, exactly. Exactly. Of course, the central point being, it's just that the whims of Robert Moses, he might have been progressive and tolerant or he might not have been. The point was you couldn't change him. That is, to me, the most important point of the book.

Brian Lehrer: Sam in Milwaukee currently reading The Power Broker. Sam, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Sam: Hello, hello. Man, that Brian and Errol talking about Moses. This is true New York history being made right now. I am reading The Power Broker. I am halfway through. For those who want to read The Power Broker but are daunted by the thousand-page limit, I would say listen to the audiobook. It makes a huge difference. I'm actually doing the audiobook right now and it's 66 hours long, but I'm 37 hours through at the moment.

Brian Lehrer: [laughs]

Sam: I have a story that I wanted to share. Just to comment on the racism element of Robert Moses, he is most certainly a racist. It's actually documented back in his days at Oxford when he was in graduate school. He nearly caused a race riot during a debate, a mock debate, where he discussed how-- Obviously, again, people will say that he's a product of his time, but he actually was talking about how Black people don't have the right to autonomy or voting and they can't make decisions on their own.

Of course, maybe in America, come the turn of the century, this might not have been such a radical thing to say out loud in public. In England, he was almost stormed off the stage. They had to run him off in fear that it would cause a panic. He also, in Harlem too, only designed one park. He refused to create open space for families with children. Obviously, he didn't care if they were playing in the alleyways or in the gutters with broomsticks for stickball. He only created one park.

In the park that he did create, he's obsessed with detail, right? The book goes so far into how crazy he was with his vision for Jones Beach and all the details for the bathhouse and the stone masonry and the tiles. He knew everything to such a fine point that he could have been, obviously, instead of a legislator, a designer, right? He also made sure that he knew what he was doing. In Harlem, in the one park that he designed, he made sure that the guardrails in front of the bathroom where iron-wrought with images of monkeys.

He was a racist. There's just no way around it. Even friends and confidants will say, "Well, you know how Robert feels about--" You could defend him. I don't really see a point doing it because, also, he didn't care about people. He didn't like people. He actually saw them as impediments. He would use them and dispose of them until they served him and that's it. He didn't care. The need to defend him, it's a moot point honestly.

Anywho, I love this book. It's the best book I've ever read honestly or listened to. Also, even though he's such a monster, Caro describes his relationship with Alfred Smith so beautifully, the governor of New York, that it made me cry. Such loyalty and friendship between these two. It's kind of astonishing the way that Caro can be so nuanced in his portrayal of Moses.

This is all to say that I started reading this back in the summer. I was with my parents on the Upper West Side. They live in a rent-stabilized apartment on the Upper West Side. My father is from Washington Heights, German-Jewish immigrant family. My mother is from the Rockaway Beach, 140th. Actually, that house stayed with us all the way up until Hurricane Sandy when it was destroyed.

We would spend all of our summers and weekends traveling from the Upper West Side down the West Side Highway, which Caro talks a lot about. We would get on the Van Wyck. This is how he would get there. West Side Highway onto the Van Wyck, right? My parents, despite being the most native New Yorkers imaginable, didn't really know the extent of Robert Moses. I think maybe a lot of New Yorkers might relate to this. "Oh, Robert Moses. Yes, I know Robert Moses."

Then when you hear everything he built, it's overwhelming. It's overwhelming to know just how grand his vision was for the city. Then finally, I'm reading the introduction to them. They're sitting there. We get to all the parkways and parks that he built. Suddenly, the Van Wyck shows up. My mother, who's sitting on the couch and is dozing off a little bit, her eyes perk up. She goes, "He built the Van Wyck? He should be in jail."

[laughter]

Sam: Literally, so many hours and days of our lives were lost, stuck in traffic--

Brian Lehrer: In traffic on the Van Wyck. Sam, thank you for a wonderful call. I really appreciate you chiming in, in the ways that you did, being on hour 37, did you say, of the audiobook. Errol, is there an alternative vision of how highways could have been built in New York? One way to look at that time is that all of the United States was building highways as the car was becoming ubiquitous, right?

If it wasn't the Cross Bronx Expressway, let's say, the way it is, it would have had to be some other way for I-95, which goes up the whole East Coast, to include New York City and come over the George Washington Bridge or something, and then somehow head up to Boston. Other people who are stuck on the Van Wyck as they're going to Kennedy Airport or wherever they're going, well, the alternative would be the local streets with the lights, so I don't know.

Errol Louis: Well, look, we are certainly part of what was at least a half-century of what we now know were either mistakes, however well-intentioned, or problems that now have to be solved. Let's put it that way. If you think about some of the Robert Moses projects that never got built, though, you can see that we weren't just going with the flow. We were in the vanguard of some of the worst ideas that were out there. Robert Moses wanted to build a bridge across the Long Island Sound, a suspension bridge, mind you, from Rye to Oyster Bay. We would have ended up looking like some of those horrible bridges you see across like the Oakland Bay Bridge or the one down in New Orleans, where it's just a giant rusting shadow over a city.

Brian Lehrer: Let me jump in and play one more clip, okay? Do you want to finish that point real quick?

Errol Louis: Yes. Well, the other, of course, is the Brooklyn Battery Bridge. He lost that particular fight. We have the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, but that was going to be another suspension bridge looking like the Manhattan Bridge leaping from Battery Park into the Red Hook area. What a disaster that would have been.

Brian Lehrer: Your podcast notes that Moses was still alive when Caro's book came out 50 years ago. He issued a 23-page, point-by-point rebuttal to some of it. Here's one more clip of Moses from that 1959 interview 15 years before The Power Broker, but still very revealing about Moses' relationship to criticism of his work when he develops a policy or a plan.

Robert Moses: In the process, there's a tremendous amount of criticism. Some of it is justified, some of it unjustified. Some of it is constructive and much of it is uninformed. A good deal of it, unfortunately, is strictly malicious. Some of it comes from people who have nothing to do but criticize. They don't have any other talent.

Brian Lehrer: Talk about arrogant.

Errol Louis: [laughs] Yes. Well, look, you and I have heard this probably our whole careers, right? That's, of course, one of the arguments that people in power like to make. "Well, at least I'm doing something." Okay, sure. [laughs]

Brian Lehrer: I think somebody named Adams was making that assertion just the other day. Last thing, we just have 20 seconds for an answer. Lizzie Gottlieb, the editor's daughter who's in your podcast, says such a book could probably never be written again. Is that because of the economics of publishing have changed so much that nothing that deeply researched could be funded? 20 seconds.

Errol Louis: Well, that's exactly right. Not only that, but just like you can't build a bridge just because you want to. No person has the kind of centralized power that would enable you to push through a risky project like this book. I think that's the reason.

Brian Lehrer: That's 100 Years of 100 Things for today. Thing 22, 100 years of Robert Moses, and 50 years of the book about him, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, by Robert Caro, with our guest, Errol Louis, political anchor on NY1, Mondays through Fridays, local, including his Friday national show and his podcast, You Decide. Their episode about The Power Broker at 50 is out today. Errol, thanks a lot.

Errol Louis: Thank you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Our next 100 Years of 100 Things segment will be next Monday on 100 years of culture wars over education.

 

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