Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York

Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson, editors

Norton Books, 2007, 336 pp., hardcover $50.

Jane Jacobs having died in April 2006, it verged on perverseness when her great nemesis, planner Robert Moses, this year became the star of three New York exhibitions, a flurry of press retrospectives, and a big new book. The effect of the recent presentations has been to cast Moses in a more positive light than Robert Caro did in his damning 1974 biography, The Power Broker.

Robert Moses and the Modern City, a large-format volume edited by Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson, tells us that Moses did good things as well as bad. Nearly 100 pages of Robert Moses and the Modern City are filled with plans, renderings, and photos of bridges, beaches, parks, parkways, pools, playgrounds, housing, and other facilities developed between 1934 and 1968 — the period in which Moses used a series of interlocking government positions to dominate public works in New York City and its region.

Readers will discover that many of the projects Moses oversaw in the thirties and forties were beautiful. No surprise there. Even Caro, in his doorstop of a biography (more than 1,100 pages), acknowledged Moses’s valuable contribution to public recreation, and admired the loveliness of his parkways. Moses’s early accomplishments reflect the fact that architecture as a whole was more humane in the 1930s and 1940s — more interested in embellishment and human scale — than it became in the fifties and sixties. Landscape designers helped shape the premier roads of the 1930s — the rustic parkways, whose atmosphere really was park-like. Postwar highway construction pushed landscape designers largely out of the picture, and the results were harsher (though higher-volume and truck-accommodating) roadways.

Jackson, a Columbia University urban historian, declares that New York’s recent revival “would not have been possible without Robert Moses.” Jackson writes: “Had the city not undertaken a massive program of public works between 1924 and 1970, had it not built an arterial highway system, and had it not relocated 200,000 people from old-law tenements to new public housing projects, New York would not have been able to claim in the 1990s that it was the capital of the twentieth century….”

Is that a fair assessment? It could just as easily be argued that the resurgence of the past 15 years is more in spite of than because of Moses’s slum clearance and expressway construction. Though Jackson makes an interesting argument that New York had to develop a robust regional highway network, the Moses method — ramming roads through dense neighborhoods, knocking down everything in sight — still strikes me as ill-considered.

The essays do help readers understand why the quality of urban design deteriorated in the fifties and sixties. Some of it was the result of changes in sources of funds. “Once federal Interstate Highway funds became available in enormous quantities after 1956, … Moses entirely discarded the last vestiges of parkway design characteristics,” notes Owen Gutfreund, a Barnard College urban historian.

Ballon, an architectural historian at Columbia, says the Title I slum clearance program, enacted by Congress in 1949, essentially made Moses a middleman between the feds and investors in real estate development. Circumscribed by bureaucracies and technical rules that lay beyond his control, needing to entice developers and financiers during an anti-urban era, Moses would have found it difficult to practice sensitive design even if he had been open to the ideas now labeled New Urbanism.

In his own way, Moses did want the city to thrive. “His aim was to strengthen the center city in an age of decentralization, suburban drift, and urban decay,” Ballon writes. “Toward this end, he pursued a three-part strategy: build housing for the middle class, expand higher education, and promote the city’s cultural preeminence. … The beneficiaries were middle- and upper-class residents; universities, college students, and an economy propelled by brainpower; and cultural institutions, suburbanites, and tourists who saw New York as a cultural magnet.”

Robert Moses and the Modern City is fascinating scholarship — thoroughly researched, vividly written, provocative in its conclusions. It provides keen insights into how and why America’s largest city was subjected to so many brutal alterations, all in the name of progress.