Robert Moses and the Failure of Vision

Robert Moses had a vision for the city of New York, and he wielded an unparalleled amount of power to realize that vision. Despite never winning elected office, he was a nearly unbeatable force in city and state politics over the course of five decades from the 1920s through the 60’s. He had an immense funding base, allies in the press, an incredible number of connections to power, and was himself a genius political tactician. When Moses wanted something done, it got done.

Moses built the bridges, the parks, the many great buildings of New York and Long Island and he built the parkways that connect them. He built the Hutchinson River Parkway, the Mosholu Parkway, the Saw Mill River Parkway, the Sprain Brook Parkway, the Cross County Parkway, the Grand Central Parkway, the Belt Parkway, the Laurelton Parkway, the Cross Island Parkway, the Interborough Parkway, the Northern State Parkway, the Southern State Parkway, the Wantagh Parkway, the Sagtikos Parkway, the Sunken Meadow Parkway, and the Meadowbrook Parkway.

Robert Moses’s vision of New York was not a just one. Rich himself, he consistently prioritized the interests of the rich. He put drivers and the driven over public transit at every opportunity. And following Robert Caro’s account, he was racially prejudiced, his vision of New York was to the benefit of whites to the detriment of everyone else. His vision was a bad one, and those who fought him and fight his legacy know it. Jane Jacobs fought Moses because she had a different vision for the city, and the only way to win was to fight for it.

Much of Moses’s vision was morally bad and it is to the detriment of those who live in the now-unchanging built environment of New York that he succeeded. Parts of his vision - parks and natural spaces in the city and convenient ways to reach the beaches on Long Island - were good and continue to be good. But it is notable that much of his own vision failed to be realized.

Moses spent most of his life being driven around in a large black car. He never learned to drive himself, as a child of privilege there was no need. And a large part of Moses’s vision for the city was that the people he cared about (the rich white people) would be pleasantly driven around in automobiles on nice pleasant parkways. As they went from place to place, they would be able to look out the window and enjoy the pleasant natural beauty of the city and its nature, saved from urban destruction by Robert Moses. Parkways were about beautiful scenery enjoyed from the window of a pleasantly moving automobile.

This is not a good vision for New York City, it comes at the cost of walkability for the majority of the city who do not drive and led to chronic underfunding of public transit. But despite the success of nearly all of Moses’s projects this is not the present reality of New York and has never really been made real. Moses’s opponents did not manage to stop him, city corruption did not deny him some final piece of the puzzle. Robert Moses, the genius tactician who achieved everything he set out to do, had failed to realize that his goal would fail due to the march of technology and growth.

Moses’s vision was born in the 1920s when automobiles were still new, rare, and slow. A drive on a road like the Henry Hudson parkway (completed by Moses in 1937) would have been a grand pleasant adventure had such parkways existed. After the 1920s, Moses became so consumed with work it is likely he rarely looked out the window. And such a dedicated and driven man does not change or update his vision of perfection. But cars got faster, and they got more common, more plentiful. By the time the parkways were built, Moses’s vision was already fading from possibility.

To drive now on a Robert Moses parkway can be more pleasant than many roads, but it is never the pleasant active drive that he had envisioned. When the roads are clear, one whizzes by, scarcely able to enjoy the landscape. The window cannot be rolled down as readily because the air whooshing in hurts one’s ears. When slowing down to the proper speed for scenery, it is because the road is not clear, it is because there is a horrible traffic jam. No one can enjoy a traffic jam. Even for the rich who are driven by a chauffeur, Robert Moses’s parkways have failed to live up to his vision.

Could Moses have done more? He seems to have been unwilling to back down, to reverse course or admit that driving had become unpleasant and that he ought to change vision if cars continued to get faster. On traffic jams he kept on pushing for wider and wider roads which never succeeded, possibly due to the induced demands and the inability to keep up with the number of drivers a driving-focused New York City was producing. A man of Moses’s intellectual might and dedication likely could have discovered the idea in academic Economics literature that the problem could be solved with congestion pricing, but it was not to be.

Moses’s vision was bad because of its intent and because of his methods, but it was also impractical. In the years since Moses’s passing from power, no one else has been able to realize any vision for New York City on the same scale. Building has become nearly impossible, tied up in bureaucratic gridlock comparable to the traffic jams which plague Moses’s roads. We desperately need change and action, more building even just to undo the mistakes that Moses made. But we also need to ensure that any vision for the future of New York possesses a practicality and technological flexibility which evaded the master builder.

After the many lessons of 20th century urban planning, we know that walkable streets and public transit scale much better with increasing population than cars do. We know that economically dynamic cities will continue to grow as long as they are not constrained (by a lack of building among other causes). New visions for New York emphasizing such values seem to have a greater savvy for the uncertain future than the builders of the past. But we still need to be careful, and we need to be willing to change our vision should history deliver the unexpected. It is not enough to be good, it is not enough to build. We must anticipate the future and be willing to improvise when reality only meets us halfway.