Robert Moses, seated at left in 1959, used his position as head of the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance to mass-produce thousands of units of public housing, often near the shoreline. Other U.S. cities were doing the same thing as New York in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s; Boston, San Francisco, and Seattle, for instance, each built highways straight through their downtown areas. If you look at the east side waterfront of Manhattan, the housing projects from 14th street to the Brooklyn Bridge are the result of Moses' work. [43][10], The peak of Moses's construction occurred during the economic duress of the Great Depression, and despite that era's woes, Moses's projects were completed in a timely fashion, and have been reliable public works since—which compares favorably to the contemporary delays New York City officials have had redeveloping the Ground Zero site of the former World Trade Center, or the technical snafus surrounding Boston's Big Dig project. (Someone else figured that out, too, judging from the word “REVERSE” written, apparently, on the negative.) A 1941 publication from the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority claimed that the government had forced them to build a tunnel at "twice the cost, twice the operating fees, twice the difficulty to engineer, and half the traffic," although engineering studies did not support these conclusions, and a tunnel may have held many of the advantages Moses publicly tried to attach to the bridge option. Now, for a whole host of reasons, New York is entering a new time, a time of optimism, growth and revival that hasn't been seen in half a century. Moses refused to budge, and after the 1957 season the Dodgers left for Los Angeles and the New York Giants left for San Francisco. His other projects included the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and Staten Island Expressway, which together constituted most of Interstate 278; the Cross-Bronx Expressway; many New York State parkways; and other highways. The fact that the fair was not sanctioned by the Bureau of International Expositions (BIE), the worldwide body supervising such events, would be devastating to the success of the event. Moses's critics charge that he preferred automobiles over people. Moses was of Jewish origin and raised in a secularist manner inspired by the Ethical Culture movement of the late 19th century. One of these was the Parkside Houses, formerly eleven acres of granite outcropping in the north Bronx. Moses was also empowered as the sole authority to negotiate in Washington for New York City projects. It could be argued that Robert Moses shaped the physical landscape of New York City more so than any other person in the twentieth century. First published on October 19, 1998 as … NYPA investment and engineers keep it cutting-edge, efficient, and, as President John F. Kennedy called it, "an example to the world of North American efficiency and determination.". Unpredicted by Moses, this is just one large negative impact that modernist urban planning had on communities. How Will the Latest Wi-Fi Tech Affect Local Areas? (But of course everyone just loves our urban legend prejudices dont we?). Robert Moses and his brother Paul attended several schools for their elementary and secondary education, including the Dwight School and the Mohegan Lake School, a military academy near Peekskill. Moses would later witness that tower public housing led to the worse crime and ghetto conditions that cities had ever seen. The New York Jets football team also played its home games at Shea from 1964 until 1983, after which the team moved its home games to the Meadowlands Sports Complex in New Jersey.[31]. Your California Privacy Rights Many would argue it began with his encouragement to demolish the historic Penn Station (a New York landmark) in favor of a much less impressive development. [14] However, in The Power Broker, biographer Robert Caro writes that Moses deliberately designed the parkways to have low bridges to prevent low-income families from traveling by bus to destinations outside of New York City. To build the Gowanus Parkway, which Moses saw as a transitional roadway to the BQE, “hundreds of buildings had to come down on both sides of [Third Avenue],” which had “flourished as the commercial core of Sunset Park’s large Scandinavian neighborhood.”, The parkway doomed the surrounding streets to permanent darkness. [9], After graduating from Yale College (B.A., 1909) and Wadham College, Oxford (B.A., Jurisprudence, 1911; M.A., 1913), and earning a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University, Moses became attracted to New York City reform politics. Later in his career, the design of these roads shifted from a well-landscaped and beautified design, to the utilitarian highways we know today. Projects spear-headed by Moses, just in this period alone, included the building of the United Nations on the east side of Manhattan, the Belt Parkway and … Historic neighborhoods and communities were bulldozed to make way for idealized and controlled housing plan across New York City. An undead version of Robert Moses is the main antagonist of the third season of College Humor's Dimension 20: The Unsleeping City. [36] Moses refused to accept BIE requirements, including a restriction against charging ground rents to exhibitors, and the BIE in turn instructed its member nations not to participate. Moses succeeded in diverting funds to his Long Island parkway projects (the Northern State Parkway, the Southern State Parkway and the Wantagh State Parkway), although the Taconic State Parkway was later completed as well. Robert Moses was one of the most politically active members of the modernist planning movement, and perhaps implemented more of the ideas than anyone on the ground. [8] Moses' father was a successful department store owner and real estate speculator in New Haven. Of this plan, only I-405, its links with I-5, and the Fremont Bridge were built. News’ now forced to share studio in LA, Master P to be honored at 2020 BET Hip Hop Awards, Andy Cohen says Eboni K. Williams is ‘no shrinking violet’, © 2020 NYP Holdings, Inc. All Rights Reserved, Judge declines to block Cuomo's COVID restrictions on synagogues, Protests will not be permitted in COVID-19 'red zones' under NYPD order, Brooklyn diocese sues Cuomo over capacity rules for churches, Jewish group sues Gov. Named city "construction coordinator" in 1946 by Mayor William O'Dwyer, Moses became New York City's de facto representative in Washington. Many would argue that it is no coincidence that his urban planning philosophy, in turn, was so car oriented. Subscribe to Smart Cities Dive to get the must-read news & insights in your inbox. The Authority was thus able to raise hundreds of millions of dollars by selling bonds, a method also used by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey[24] to fund large public construction projects. This story has been shared 334,702 times. Moses then widened the avenue “from four lanes to 10 to handle all the truck traffic generated by the still-busy industrial waterfront.”, “Within a decade,” Campanella writes, “not only Third Avenue — once home to seven movie theaters, scores of shops, stores, restaurants and cafes — but much of Sunset Park would be spiraling toward abandonment and blight. Nevertheless, he created and led numerous public authorities that gave him autonomy from the general public and elected officials. There are many urban designers that this series could begin with like Kevin Lynch, Gordon Cullen, or Jane Jacobs : many are considered great in our history. The project had its own security guards, but they were “older and poorly trained,” and carried no guns. They point out that he displaced hundreds of thousands of residents in New York City, destroying traditional neighborhoods by building multiple expressways through them. It was the first fully divided limited access highway in the world. No doubt influenced by other planners' philosophy of the time, like Corbusier, Moses favored the eradication of "blight" and the construction of high-rise public housing projects. According to Columbia University architectural historian Hilary Ballon and assorted colleagues, Moses deserves better than his reputation as a destroyer. Robert Moses had power over the construction of all public housing projects, but the one position above all others giving him political power was his chairmanship of the Triborough Bridge Authority. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Moses was born in New Haven, Connecticut, to assimilated German Jewish parents, Bella (Silverman) and Emanuel Moses. . Some people have great respect for Robert Moses (many call him the Master Builder,) but if you ask most urban designers about him, they will quickly mention  Jane Jacobs. The overall facility includes two intake structures, two underground conduits and associated pump stations, a forebay, the Lewiston Reservoir, the Lewiston Pump Generating Plant, the Robert Moses Niagara Power Plant, and the Niagara Switchyard. A visiting reporter noted broken windows and hallways filled with trash, and that summer saw racial battles, including more than a hundred white teenagers “descending on the project … armed with clubs and baseball bats” to beat up black teens. It’s New York State’s biggest electricity producer, providing up to 2.6 million kilowatts of clean electricity. [40][10] However, Caro also points out that Moses demonstrated racist tendencies. Do Not Sell My Personal Information, Your California Privacy Rights [27], Moses's power increased after World War II after Mayor LaGuardia retired and a series of successors consented to almost all of his proposals. [3] Moses would call himself a "coordinator" and was referred to in the media as a "master builder".[3]. Caro's 1,200-page opus (edited down from over 3,000 pages) showed Moses generally in a negative light; essayist Phillip Lopate writes that "Moses's satanic reputation with the public can be traced, in the main, to ... Caro's magnificent biography". [33] This casual destruction of one of New York's greatest architectural landmarks helped prompt many city residents to turn against Moses's plans to build a Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have gone through Greenwich Village and what is now SoHo. Caro's The Power Broker accused Moses of building the bridges across his parkways low in order to "restrict the use of state parks by poor and lower-middle-class families," who did not own cars and would arrive by bus, and of discouraging blacks, in particular, from visiting Jones Beach, the centerpiece of the Long Island state park system, by such measures as making it difficult for black groups to get permits to park buses even if they came anyway (by other roads); assigning black lifeguards to "distant, less developed beaches" instead; and keeping the water temperature in the pool low, in the belief that black people were less tolerant of cold water. 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