Robert Moses and the Shaping of New York, Part 1

Robert Moses is responsible for so much of the infrastructure of New York, including parks, bridges, highways and more. And he remains a divisive figure. The first part of this two-parter covers his rise in New York government.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  The Old Gays are back with Silver Linings, their lovable podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with Vive Healthcare. Robert, Mick, Bill, and Jessa strut back down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love, and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience. So tune into Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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• 3:38Speaker 07

  Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced-calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, OSA, and obesity to improve their OSA. Zepbound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15-milligram injection. Zepbound contains trisepotide and should not be used with other trisepotide-containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Zepbound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens, or reuse needles. Don't take if allergic to it, or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer, or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop Zepbound and call your doctor if you have severe stomach pain or a serious allergic

• 4:23Speaker 07

  reaction. Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia, if you're nursing, pregnant, plant-to-be, or taking birth control pills. Taking Zepbound with a sulphonal urea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems.

• 4:46Speaker 06

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• 4:54Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 5:05Holly Frey?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey.

• 5:08Tracy V. Wilson?

  And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 5:09Holly Frey?

  So recently, as I was scrolling about on social media, as one does, uh, there was a, in my case, Instagram post by New York Mayor Saron Mamdani announcing that the city was going to start a renovation of a one-and-a-half-mile section of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, known as the BQE, to New Yorkers that runs between Atlantic Avenue and Sand Street. The whole expressway does, not that section. There's so much punditry about this announcement and whether it's good or bad. We're not weighing in on any of that, uh, because I don't live in New York. I don't have, you know, this, I'm in New York a lot, which is why I keep getting fed these ads or these videos, but, um, I don't live there, so I don't feel like I have any

• 5:54Holly Frey?

  gravity regarding the situation. But in that announcement, uh, Mayor Mamdani mentioned Robert Moses. Uh-huh. And said like, oh, that's a whole other video. And I was like, oh, yeah, there's a person that is controversial and intriguing and worth talking about.

• 6:12Holly Frey?

  Because he is responsible for so much of the infrastructure that is part of day-to-day life in New York. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica count, his work included 35 highways, 12 bridges, numerous parks, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Shea Stadium, many housing projects, two hydroelectric dams, and the 1964 New York World's Fair.

• 6:37Holly Frey?

  We're not going to talk about all of that because we can't. There's just too much. But we will talk about some of the things that he worked on and the controversies that played out and continue to.

• 6:48Holly Frey?

  New Yorkers, I feel like, and people who are into urban planning instantly know who you're talking about when you say Robert Moses. But in my casual survey of people in my life, a lot of people did not seem to really know about him or fully understand the breadth of his impact. And here's the thing, when you look at his life story and his career, it is a wild ride, and there is, as I said, a lot, even pared down to exclude a lot of his big projects. Like, we're not talking about Lincoln Center today. Sorry if you wanted that. But even getting rid of some of those big projects, it's still another two-parter. Because Robert Moses was busy. He's got some problems in his career that we have to talk about.

• 7:29Holly Frey?

  And even though he has been dead for 45 years at this point, he remains a divisive figure whose legacy is probably going to be debated for another century or more. And he really did, though, impact the city, and he created that legacy, interestingly enough, without ever having held public office. He was never elected to public office, although he did manage to gain an awful lot of power through appointments to government positions.

• 7:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  Robert Moses was born December 18, 1888, to Emmanuel and Bella Moses in New Haven, Connecticut, where Emmanuel had a department store. The Moses' home was just a couple of blocks away from the Yale University campus, and they lived there until Robert was nine years old. Then the family moved to New York City at Bella's insistence. Emmanuel was already planning his retirement, so once he was done with working, the Moseses moved to East 46th Street in Manhattan. Once they were in the city, Bella worked in a settlement house that helped Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.

• 8:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  And that sounds like kind of a wholesome project for her to do, but Bella had her own agenda at work with this. She really thought immigrants had to be Americanized.

• 8:46Holly Frey?

  Yeah, Bella, I feel like, could be her own topic. I don't know if there's enough information on her, but she sounds like a very headstrong, very bossy woman with a lot of ideas. She came from a lot of money. Bella. Uh, that's all I got to say on that one. She will come up briefly later in the episode. But after going to prep school, Robert enrolled at Yale. And as an undergrad, he was really active in a lot of sports. He was a standout on the swimming and water polo teams. He completed his undergraduate degree in 1909. And then he went to Wadham College, Oxford, for his master's degree. And Moses made a really strong, positive impression on his fellow students in England.

• 9:31Holly Frey?

  And he was elected president of the Oxford Union. That's the debating society. He is the only student from the US to have ever held that position, as far as I could tell. I know he was the only one at that time. Moses then went to Columbia to get his PhD in political science. And his dissertation for his PhD reflected the influence of his time at Oxford. It was titled "The Civil Service of Great Britain." And he received his PhD in 1913.

• 10:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  The months immediately after the completion of his education were very busy for Robert Moses. He had a job basically waiting for him, thanks to his mother's connections. That was at the Training School for Public Service, which prepared students to work in government jobs.

• 10:16Holly Frey?

  This job was apparently not something that Moses especially liked. He thought it was really dull and unstimulating. Working at the school did have some positives for him, though. It led him to meet his future wife, Mary Sims. And he did pretty quickly find a way out of the tedium of the training school. And that was in a job working for John Perrow Mitchell, the mayor of New York, as part of the New York City's Bureau of Municipal Research. So this job, still related, of course, to government work. But this time, Robert was reorganizing the city's government, or at least making recommendations for it. And he found that much more engaging.

• 10:58Holly Frey?

  All of these moves and meeting Mary, that all happened still in 1913, the same year as his PhD. So it was, as we said, a very busy year for him. Then, after a two-year courtship, Robert and Mary got married. That was in 1915, and they would go on to have two daughters together.

• 11:15Tracy V. Wilson?

  After several years of working for the city, he met Alfred E. Smith, the new governor of New York, and became part of his team. The actual job came through Belle Moskowitz, who was a progressive reformer who had become Smith's advisor. And she could easily be an episode in the future. In 1919, Moses became the chief of staff for the New York State Reconstruction Commission. Smith had assembled this group, and Moskowitz had brought Moses on to bring change to New York through a government reorg. Moses learned a lot from Moskowitz in this role. And she had a really deep understanding of how to maneuver through the government

• 11:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  to achieve goals without angering the people who held power, an important skill.

• 12:02Holly Frey?

  Yes, she's really considered a mentor to him. And like, there's one example of him making a recommendation at one point in an early draft of a report about having to cut some of the workforce. And she was like, ah, don't forget, every one of those people is a voter. And we don't want to make them mad. We have to figure out a way to cut costs without eliminating this many people. Just little things like that, that she taught him to think about as he was doing his government work. And in this new role, Robert Moses first had to make an assessment report on the state of the government, and then a plan for a state government reorganization, similar to what he had done for the city.

• 12:45Holly Frey?

  On October 10, 1919, Moses submitted that report to the governor. It was titled "Report of Reconstruction Commission to Governor Alfred E. Smith on Retrenchment and Reorganization in the State Government." This was a substantial document. The summary alone was 42 pages long, and there were another 372 pages to it.

• 13:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  Moses had spearheaded an in-depth look at every single job in the state government. And he made thousands of recommendations based on that look. This really started things off on the right foot for him, as the report was considered both comprehensive and impressive. It gave Moses enough clout with the governor that he stepped into an advisory role with the state administration. The report was very popular with progressives. A lot of the recommendations in the document required approval from the legislature, or even changes to the state constitution. And a lot of that passed, but not all of it. Moses intended to keep lobbying for the remaining recommendations.

• 13:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  But in 1920, he had a hiccup in this plan. And his career was also having a little hiccup, because Alfred E. Smith lost the gubernatorial election. Moses got a new job with the New York State Association, but he and Al Smith kept in close touch after this.

• 14:09Holly Frey?

  And then in 1922, Smith ran again, and this time, he won by a huge margin. Once he was back in the governor's seat, Moses was right back on track with his own career and was once again a rising star in the state government. In 1924, Governor Alfred E. Smith appointed Moses to a role that he would parlay into a huge amount of power, because he became the head of the New York and Long Island Park Commissions.

• 14:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  We will talk about why the Park Commission job was so important after we pause for a sponsor break.

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• 16:05Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 17:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jesse have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane, navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends

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• 21:22Speaker 06

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• 21:38Speaker 07

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• 22:23Speaker 07

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• 22:45Speaker 06

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• 22:59Holly Frey?

  The significance of the New York and Long Island Park Commission's position is really tied to shifting socioeconomic conditions in the US in the mid-1920s. So we're going to zoom out for a second. In the first quarter of the 20th century, there were a lot of reforms and changes for the US. There were moves for business regulation and better working conditions. And then after World War I, economic prosperity reached a wider range of people than ever before. A lot of households saw an increase in their income, with working hours also being reduced in many sectors. While the 40-hour work week was still decades away from becoming a federal law, a number

• 23:40Holly Frey?

  of factories and large companies had already adopted the eight-hour workday. And what all of this means is that New Yorkers had more leisure time and a little more cash in their pockets. So places like parks were becoming more and more important as a place to spend those free hours. Robert Moses really recognized this change, and he leveraged the growing role that park spaces played in New York into expanding his own prominence.

• 24:08Tracy V. Wilson?

  And Moses reshaped the way the government approached new park projects in the state. When he stepped into the role, most of their plans for green spaces were really about maintaining them in their natural state as like a preserved wilderness. But Moses envisioned the addition of more manicured and cultivated spaces with dedicated recreation areas.

• 24:33Holly Frey?

  Moses also used his work with the parks in a way that changed New York's transportation infrastructure significantly. Because anytime he built a new park, he also made sure that project included access to the park in the form of roads that connected new green spaces to the highways. He was building parkways. That's why they're called that. From the beginning, he had planned a large state park system for Long Island that would all be connected together by new roadways. But that also meant that landowners on Long Island were going to have to give up their property. This was not popular. A lot of those landowners were from old New York money, and there was a lot of contentious back and forth.

• 25:14Holly Frey?

  But ultimately, Moses saw the majority of his plans come to fruition.

• 25:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  Over the course of just four years in this position, Robert Moses added 13 parks to Long Island, totaling about 9,700 acres. There had only been one there when he started, so this was a massive increase in park space, but also in roadways. He definitely felt that advocating for park space, he would retain the favor of the general public, once stating, quote, "As long as you're fighting for parks, you can be sure of having public opinion on your side. And as long as you have public opinion on your side, you're safe." In 1927, he became New York Secretary of State, which is a role that he filled for two years. It was one of many times in his career that he stacked jobs.

• 26:03Tracy V. Wilson?

  He was serving in multiple positions at once.

• 26:07Holly Frey?

  Yeah, he never seemed to leave a job for a while. He just kept adding, adding, adding. One of the biggest projects that was undertaken by Moses in the 1920s was Jones Beach. So this was actually named for a 17th century privateer named Major Thomas Jones, who is said to have built the first brick house on Long Island, and whose property included a stretch of land that included what would become a park site. The project that Moses was plotting, which is still today one of the most popular beach spots on the East Coast, came to exist through sheer determination. It started as a sandbar along the southern edge of Long Island. And when Moses initially looked at it as a potential park site, it was barely above

• 26:52Holly Frey?

  sea level, and it was frequently completely underwater during inclement weather. Like, anytime there was a storm surge, that basically went away. Moses said of the site later, quote, "Let us have no illusions about Jones Beach as we found it. It was an isolated swampy sandbar accessible only by small boats and infrequent ferries inhabited by fishermen and loners, surf casters, and assorted oddballs and beachcombers trying to get away from it all. The tales told of a lovely primitive paradise wilderness with indestructible dunes were fiction. Jones Beach was in fact a mosquito-infested tidal swamp full of stagnant pools flanked by shifting dunes."

• 27:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  But Moses thought it could be something else, and he started sketching out ideas for a grand park. While a lot of people in the government and the press wrote off the idea as completely unrealistic, Moses continued to push for it. And once he got through the endless red tape and political maneuvering that was necessary, he still had a huge road ahead of him. First, he had to make a sandbar into something more. The solution was a massive dredging project. A reported 40 million cubic yards of sand were brought up from the ocean floor to build up the sandbar into an actual island. And the result was that it went from two feet above sea level to 12 feet above sea level.

• 28:19Holly Frey?

  And then this project kind of looked like it was dead when the money just ran out. Moses, though, was determined to finish, and he did something very unorthodox to make up the gap in funding, which is that he went to his mother Bella and asked her for a loan. He got $20,000 from her to continue this project. This is one of those things that the first time you read it, sounds utterly preposterous. And I was like, I gotta fact-check this in several places. Moses verified it later in his life, stating that if his mother had not come through with that money, the contractors were not going to return with their equipment to finish the job.

• 28:58Tracy V. Wilson?

  Finally, against all odds, Jones Beach opened on August 4th, 1925 during a sandstorm. The dedication still happened, though, and Moses gave a speech, as did Alfred E. Smith and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was the governor of the state at the time. And people literally flocked to the new place, which offered a gorgeous view of the Atlantic Ocean. An estimated 1.5 million people visited the park in its first year alone. During that time, construction had begun on additional facilities for the park, swimming pools and the West Bath House. In its final form, it is the largest public recreational bathing park in the world, at

• 29:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  2,413 acres, with 6.5 miles of ocean beach frontage. And Robert Moses had overseen every aspect of all the facilities, right down to the design elements on the buildings. By the end of 1931, just two years after opening, traffic to Jones Beach had gotten so bad that land from the town of Hempstead was given to the state to make another causeway to try to handle the load.

• 30:06Holly Frey?

  If you are familiar with the story of Jones Beach and you're wondering right now, are you going to mention the overpass bridges? Because Tracy asked me when she read this outline. We're going to talk about it in the behind the scenes, because that is a very complex topic all on its own.

• 30:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  It's kind of a whole thing.

• 30:20Holly Frey?

  Sure is. And it would derail the narrative of this story. So, a construction project that began after Jones Beach was the Grand Central Parkway. That runs from the Triboro Bridge out to the county line that separates Queens and Nassau Counties. And it offers up a good example of why the work that Moses did remains debated. So, the Grand Central Parkway was initially intended as a scenic drive-through Queens. That was back in 1922, pre-Moses, for the most part. And at that time, the Queens Topographical Society had actually had its engineers go out and survey the area, and they proposed a roadway that would run from Queens Boulevard in Q County to Nassau County.

• 31:03Tracy V. Wilson?

  But it took nine years to get it to the construction phase, and Robert Moses came onto the project in 1924. Moses thought the plan could be expanded so that Manhattan residents could use the roadway to access parks and beaches on Long Island. And this was supported by his bosses. During the opening ceremonies of Jones Beach, Governor Roosevelt said he wanted the parkway that connected Long Island to Triboro Bridge, quote, "so that we who live up on the Hudson will be able to get more easily to Long Island and for us to have more visitors from Long Island." So, at that point, it was obvious that Jones Beach had become a new reason to expand that original project.

• 31:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  Moses showed off his expanded plan to civic leaders in a meeting the following year at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel.

• 31:55Holly Frey?

  And as this project was being developed, Moses wanted the roadway to be much wider than the existing space would allow. That would have required the destruction of quite a number of homes. A county official fought him on this matter, asking if Moses was going to relocate the displaced residents. And when Moses said he couldn't do that, that county official did everything in his power to save those residences, and Moses, as a consequence, had to build a narrower road. But that actually created a problem later on. We're jumping ahead just a bit. We're going to come back to it mostly in part two, but when the 1964 World's Fair was on the horizon, it became apparent that that initial parkway was not wide enough to accommodate

• 32:39Holly Frey?

  the traffic that was expected. So, Moses got his way some years later, and those people did still lose their houses.

• 32:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  Moses had also been made chairman of the New York Park Association's Metropolitan Conference on Parks in the 1920s, which enabled him to prepare plans for park spaces in Manhattan. In 1930, he submitted a report that called for the city to acquire as much remaining undeveloped and rural land as possible. As he had done with his Long Island plan, he had envisioned both park spaces and parkways to connect everything. The recommendations in this report were put into practice, and the Belt, Grand Central, Cross Island and Henry Hudson parkways were all created as a result.

• 33:26Holly Frey?

  Coming up, we're going to talk about Roosevelt's New Deal and a long treatise about slums that Moses wrote for The Atlantic. But before we get into all of that, we're going to take a sponsor break.

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• 33:50Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 34:10Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 34:33Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 34:40Speaker 07

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• 34:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  Ben, how have you been using YouTube Premium?

• 34:43Speaker 07

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• 35:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  Amazing.

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• 35:05Holly Frey?

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• 35:50Holly Frey?

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• 36:04Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 36:47Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 37:30Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 39:41Holly Frey?

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• 40:24Holly Frey?

  Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 40:44Holly Frey?

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• 41:25Holly Frey?

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• 41:55Holly Frey?

  When FDR implemented his New Deal program in 1933, it offered an opportunity to Robert Moses in the form of federal funding for his plans through the Works Progress Administration. After that massive success of the Jones Beach Project, Moses had a reputation unlike almost anyone else who worked in government. On January 1, 1934, Fiorella LaGuardia began his first term as mayor of New York City. And in his first weeks in that position, LaGuardia made Moses head of the New York City Park Commission. And just as the mayor had moved quickly to appoint Moses, Moses moved quickly to make updates to the parks.

• 42:38Holly Frey?

  Over the course of just a few months, the city's parks had a lot of improvements. They had fresh lawns. The tennis courts were all resurfaced. Bathrooms and drinking fountains were all clean, and they had been repaired as needed.

• 42:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  That same year, LaGuardia expanded Moses's power when he also appointed him chairman of the Triborough Bridge Authority. More than a decade later, it would be renamed the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority. He was still head of the Park Commission. And this is something that was very much a part of the power Moses accumulated. He held a lot of offices concurrently, and that offered him a significant breadth of power over a lot of public works projects.

• 43:20Holly Frey?

  Yeah, he also had a lot of overlap in the various commissions, agencies, and offices that he was in charge of, so he could kind of play a little bit of chess. We're going to talk about, in part two, a lot about how problematic that was for people. There was a brief moment when it seemed like Robert Moses might be thinking bigger than heading up city and state commissions. We mentioned in the opening to this episode that Robert Moses was not an elected official, but he did run for public office just once. In 1934, he ran for governor of New York, and he got trounced. The incumbent Democratic governor, Herbert H. Lehman, got more than 2.2 million votes

• 44:01Holly Frey?

  in the popular vote, and Moses got less than 1.4 million. In the announcement of Lehman's win, at the New York Times, the paper noted, quote, "Meanwhile, his redoubtable and militant opponent, Robert Moses, will remain free to go on with his work as a great park commissioner."

• 44:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  Starting in the 1930s with this expanded power, he launched an ambitious plan to add parks, playgrounds, bridges, tunnels, and highways to New York. He expanded the city's playgrounds significantly. He built 235 new ones, and that sounds excellent. But another pattern in his career was really starting to emerge, and that is one in which he just disregarded the needs of areas of the city with predominantly non-white populations. So of those 235 playgrounds, for example, only one of them was in Harlem. In the summer of 1936, he opened 11 new swimming pools.

• 44:58Tracy V. Wilson?

  Four were in Manhattan, which did include one in Harlem and another in West Harlem. There were four in Brooklyn, and then one each in the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island. These pools were considered cutting-edge. They had new filtration and chlorination systems, and they were heated and had underwater lighting. Per the New York Parks Department, quote, "The influence of the pools extended throughout entire communities, attracting aspiring athletes and neighborhood children, and changing the way millions of New Yorkers spent their leisure time." But they weren't used only for swimming. The pools were also designed to be drained in the cooler months and used for other activities ranging from shuffleboard to roller skating.

• 45:40Holly Frey?

  Yeah, they could be kind of adapted into being tennis courts, basketball courts, et cetera, as needed. Starting in the 1940s, Moses sought, he said, to get rid of New York slums. He was obviously not the first person to want that, but because he had amassed a great deal of clout and power at that point, his very strong opinions on the matter held a lot of weight. And he was named chairman of the mayor's slum clearance committee. And this is one of his initiatives that really remains hotly debated today, and rightly so. In 1945, he penned an article for The Atlantic that opened with, quote, "The general pattern of the development of slums is almost always the same.

• 46:25Holly Frey?

  They begin with the overcrowding of existing buildings and the addition of tenants built by consciousless speculators to a considerable height on little land without reference to light, air, sanitation, and other standards of decent living and safety. The place of a single family in a reasonably comfortable house is taken by a number of families, and in the tenements, people are packed in like chickens in a coop. Wave after wave of newcomers inhabit these rookeries. As soon as one generation achieves enough prosperity to get out, it moves on, and another with lower standards and income takes its place." So that's just the opening, and we're going to spend quite a bit of time with this article

• 47:07Holly Frey?

  because it really evidences some of the reasons that Moses and his approach have continued to be controversial.

• 47:15Tracy V. Wilson?

  So he goes on to explain that the gap between politicians and social and civic workers of how this cycle plays out leads to years of trying to get everybody on the same page. And during that time, those neighborhoods continue to decline. He states, quote, "In the meantime, local political hacks satisfy the customers, or at least prevent an open revolution, by handouts of coal and wood, groceries and Christmas baskets. Property owners, real estate developers and their allies, banks, estates, and even churches are content to collect their rents and close their eyes to the implications of their investments." He praises the work of settlement houses.

• 47:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  He name-checks Jane Addams, among others, at this point. But he also states that their work is done, and that, quote, "The task now is one of engineering and management, and that they must turn the job over to administrators."

• 48:13Holly Frey?

  Yeah, that one is so wild to me. Like, oh, that's great that you helped people. We'll take it from here.

• 48:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  We're done helping. You're done helping.

• 48:21Holly Frey?

  Yeah. Moving on. We're going to administrate the heck out of this problem. He also blames rapid transit for the speed of decline in these neighborhoods. This is something that he has been criticized about since the 1940s, that he was very against transit in cities. He states, quote, "If in New York City we had refrained from building so many miles of subway at $20 million a mile, and had put some of this money into rehabilitating and making livable and attractive the older and central parts of town, millions of people would not today be crowded like cattle into hurtling trains during the rush hours." He also chastises the people who made their money in New York real estate at the end

• 49:04Holly Frey?

  of the 1800s and early 1900s, citing their malignant influence. And he says the stories of how they created slums should be repeated periodically so that people do not do the same things over and over. He cites the praise these speculators received in their time as, quote, "One of the saddest commentaries on our urban civilization."

• 49:26Tracy V. Wilson?

  Of all the things that he says in this article, I mean, I have problems with a lot of them. But the part about transit makes absolutely no sense to me.

• 49:36Holly Frey?

  Like, no, he just thinks like, if you make the center of town pretty, nobody will want to go anywhere. I don't, it's like, oh, doodles.

• 49:44Tracy V. Wilson?

  You know what would cause there to be fewer people crammed into trains on transit? More trains, more of them, that would be great. Anyway, uh, when Moses offers what he calls a cure, uh, it's a whole other thing. He notes that what he calls endless wranglings over the way to fix such problems often lead to stalemates, and then nothing improves. He wrote, quote, "Slums cannot be cleaned out all at once, except in campaign oratory and the familiar literature of social agencies. There has to be a time schedule as well as a program. There must be limited objectives. There must be compromise."

• 50:26Holly Frey?

  This is so fascinating to me because as we'll talk about later, and particularly in part two, he kind of contradicts himself in his behavior, uh, regarding all of these things that he's preaching in this article. He also gets in some digs at the groups that he blames for the slowdowns in progress. He's like, I have all the right ideas if you just listen to me, but these guys want to argue about it. He says, quote, "The pinks and reds who never get their roots down anywhere." And then he cites, quote, "The perfectionists who are not revolutionaries, but will agree to no compromise." And then he kind of gets to at least what feels like his point in that section, that getting rid of slums in most cities has been done indirectly, quote, "through clearance not for public, semi-public, or private housing,

• 51:12Holly Frey?

  but for parks, playgrounds, parkways, expressways, boulevards, and other public improvements."

• 51:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  And then he crow's about what he believes to be his achievement. Quote, "That my particular little group of demolition and building demons have without fanfare and social worker abracadabra pulled down more old rookeries than all the housing experts and authorities put together. And the best thing about it is we have substituted nothing for the rookeries, but broad highways lined with landscaping and recreation facilities, open to the sun and the elements, affording the very best incentive to further slum clearance and improvement on their boundaries."

• 51:55Holly Frey?

  Yeah, just put a road there, it'll be fine.

• 51:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  It's fine to just not have the housing that the people were living in. If there's going to be a road, I hate it.

• 52:03Holly Frey?

  I, yeah, I mean, I think everybody does. That's, this is the, the really rough part of his legacy is that like, he just had this shortsightedness that is really grounded in, in racism. He then states, quote, "I am a strong believer in subsidized public housing within proper limits and have worked hard to support it, but I intend to be honest about it." And then he outlines what he believes the obstacles are. One is, of course, the funding source. He explains that public money has been used for funding such projects, but that, quote, "A constitutional amendment is required to permit states and municipalities to enter this field." And that legislation introduced up to that point had been quite vague, and that the people crafting that language did not fully understand the situation.

• 52:47Holly Frey?

  Basically saying like, if we want to go in and, and run new places, new livable multifamily facilities, like, we gotta get a bunch of permission from the state, but like, the people trying to write the laws to even give us that permission don't understand any of this. He does come off as very conceited all the time. Um, additionally, most of the government subsidized housing that was built around the country only addressed, in his opinion, the housing itself and not community features like recreation, school utilities, and services like fire and police. Uh, his own writing placed recreation first on that list. This is another thing that I find slightly, um,

• 53:28Holly Frey?

  I don't even want to say infuriating, but it's like, you see how easily he has become a figure of controversy because he says things in some ways that sound reasonable. Of course, communities should have all the things that support them, but then he also says things like, just put a road there. Um, so it's a problem. Another issue that he mentions in these plans is that tenants in subsidized houses that pay a reduced rent just don't provide enough money for the upkeep of those facilities, let alone to maintain the community. So there's an ongoing financial problem. As he put it, quote, "Obviously, there is a limit to completely subsidized public housing, and we are rapidly approaching it."

• 54:11Holly Frey?

  Moses wanted the income from partially subsidized housing invested so that it could, in the long term, provide some sort of fiscal growth.

• 54:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  His next point is that the problem only continues to grow because the definition of low income continues to expand, which means that more and more people qualify for subsidized housing, and the financial imbalance of income versus expense only gets worse. Additionally, he expresses frustration that if federal and state governments fund subsidized housing, bureaucrats want to be the boss of the program without understanding it.

• 54:46Holly Frey?

  The issue of land cost is also addressed in this article, and this is one of the most controversial aspects of the Moses approach. He states that acquiring a lot of land at a reasonable price becomes impossible, and that this is the solution. Quote, "In this situation, the power of eminent domain is the only salvation. Condemnation must be exercised for the private limited dividend or redevelopment company by the city, state, or federal government." So basically just condemn those places and we can just seize them. Uh, but there is still a need for investment. And he cites an agreement that the state actually came to with Metropolitan Life Insurance Company to invest in slum clearance projects as a great achievement

• 55:30Holly Frey?

  that required courage on the part of the company to buy into.

• 55:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  Next, he addresses rehabilitation and its place in improving troubled areas of the city. This is another instance where he talks about how perfectionists ruin everything because they won't usually agree to just adapting old tenements to be sanitary and fireproof. They want to build brand new buildings. He notes that, quote, "This situation can be measurably improved by cutting through new streets and pedestrian lanes and by establishing small neighborhood parks and playgrounds. The average brick tenement has a good deal of life left, and people can live decently in crowded quarters if they have heat, hot water, bathrooms, fire escapes, as well as light and gas."

• 56:17Holly Frey?

  And then he goes after the unions, calling organized labor, quote, "A serious obstacle in the way of financing slum clearance." He talks about the union's insistence on preserving its right to hourly wages, how dare, strikes, and, quote, "Resistance to inventions and improvements in the building field, all being things that are causing problems." He writes, quote, "The notion that every effort to reduce building costs, every advance in building technique is an attack on unionism and a conspiracy against the laboring man is so deep-seated that there seems no possibility of dislodging it. This attitude makes no sense, but it will not change until we deal with another generation of union officials educated in a better school."

• 57:03Holly Frey?

  I might be misreading, but this sure sounds like he wants to ditch all the protections of a union and everything that a union exists for in the name of faster and cheaper construction.

• 57:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  That was how it read to me, too.

• 57:16Holly Frey?

  I was like, I puzzled over this yesterday for a long time going, "Am I, am I taking crazy pills? Is he basically saying the union stinks because it won't let me make people work for 80 hours a week for two bucks an hour?"

• 57:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  Right, right. Then he concludes the article by noting that the other need to consider is preventing slums from forming by raising zoning standards. He believes that real estate promoters, banks, and other entities with a financial stake in the slums all bear some blame for the problem, as they have all used their influence to keep standards low.

• 57:50Holly Frey?

  See, that's one of the moments where I'm like, that part makes sense. I understand, like, these people that are, you know, in it for the money are leveraging the people they know in government to not make them clean anything up. That's all true, that sounds reasonable. And then he keeps talking.

• 58:08Holly Frey?

  Okay, so we have shared a lot from this very opinionated article, and it represents a sort of midpoint in the career of Robert Moses for a lot of people. So we're gonna stop here and we are actually gonna continue his story next time.

• 58:26Holly Frey?

  And in the meantime.

• 58:27Tracy V. Wilson?

  Is there a listener mail?

• 58:29Holly Frey?

  Well, here's one. This is from our listener, Kristin. She mentions that this is from the behind the scenes where we were talking about Mary Mellon, but she's talking about a thing I specifically mentioned.

• 58:42Holly Frey?

  She writes, Dear Holly and Tracy, I was listening as I was driving. I actually paused this episode and pulled over because I did not want to forget my comments. First, I had my gallbladder removed two years ago. I went to the ER thinking I was having a heart attack. Heart disease runs in my dad's family. One of the doctors working ER was at the check-in desk and he was pretty confident it was my gallbladder, but ordered an EKG due to family history. My kids are in their late twenties, so memory of childbirth pain has faded, but the gallbladder pain was awful. Ended up having it removed, then spent months getting my body to adjust to how it processed certain types of food. Spice, caffeine, cream, stuff I cook with regularly. Me too. I will say, and I don't mean to be braggy, my body

• 59:27Holly Frey?

  has been much cooler than a lot of other people's in dealing with post-gallbladder life. I have not had the same limitations that many people have had to live with. Secondly, she says, I agree with Holly about Anthony Bourdain. I read Kitchen Confidential shortly before his food travel series aired, and my opinion of him plummeted. He had berated TV chefs, and now he was basically doing the same thing. It took me a long time to come around as well. Love the show. Pet tax pictures are the three voids that keep me busy. Stella, long-haired female and complete diva. Even the 80-pound dog bows to her. Stella looks a lot like our cat, Marva, which means I'm in love with her.

• 1:00:09Holly Frey?

  She is absolutely beautiful. She is a long-haired, gorgeous, black cat. She and Marva could probably get into some legal trouble together. I always joke, I'm gonna wake up one day and find out that the deed to our house has somehow been transferred to the cat, and it's because Marva went to law school at the night. There's also another absolutely beautiful, it looks like a solid black kitty, but it could have some coloring, kind of wedging itself through the opening in a sewing machine between the main machine and the needle underneath the arm. I've had cats do that as well. They're so cute. Oh, says Garibaldi, youngest, loves fabric and my embroidery

• 1:00:50Holly Frey?

  machine must always be supervised. Looks all black in the second picture. Absolutely adorable. I don't even let my cats in the sewing room when the embroidery machine is going because I'm scared someone will stick their paw in there. And it gets running automatically, so I'm not there to just take the pedal off. I would have to run over and stop it. And I'm too scared to. So, and then the beautiful 80-pound dog, which is a big white fluffy. It looks like a Samyed, not positive, could be a great peer. Not clear based on this picture. And then she signs off. That dog is very beautiful, though. It's lying down, which is why it's really hard to tell, to gauge the size and the, they look very similar to me. Also, I don't know as much about dog breeds as I

• 1:01:34Holly Frey?

  do cat breeds. I know a fair amount, but not. Anyway, Kristin, this email is terrific. I also really just wanted to read it because it was another instance of someone who has had a child saying that gallbladder pain was pretty darn bad.

• 1:01:50Holly Frey?

  Thank you so much for writing this. I'm kind of obsessed with these cats, most especially beautiful Stella, of course, because she is a supermodel. If you would like to write to us and share your supermodel pets, or anything that you think is of interest, or your stories of going to the hospital, whatever it is, I'm down to read it. You can do that at [email protected]. You can also find show notes for today's episode or any of the shows that we have done, at least in the, I want to say recent past, but it's been like a decade. Those are at Missed in History. If you just click into any of the episodes, you'll see the show notes with all of the things we use to research. And we hope that you enjoy those if you want to continue to read about anything we talk

• 1:02:35Holly Frey?

  about. You can also subscribe to the show if you haven't done that yet. That is very, very simple. It's an easy operation of clicking a thing on your phone on the iHeartRadio app, or really, you can do that anywhere you listen to podcasts.

• 1:02:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 1:03:09Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:03:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  You ever show up late to the game and your friends already saved your seat, your drink, even a plate? That's looking out. That's having your back. And that's exactly what AT&T does with the AT&T Guarantee. They know staying connected matters, so they actually guarantee a network that comes through when it counts. AT&T has connectivity you can depend on, or they'll proactively make it right, just like that friend who takes care of things before you even ask. AT&T, connecting changes everything. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details.

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  Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, OSA, and obesity to improve their OSA. Zepbound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15-milligram injection. Zepbound contains trisepotide and should not be used with other trisepotide-containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Zepbound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens or reuse needles. Don't take if allergic to it, or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer, or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop Zepbound and

• 1:05:11Speaker 07

  call your doctor if you have severe stomach pain or a serious allergic reaction. Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia, if you're nursing, pregnant, plant-to-be, or taking birth control pills. Taking Zepbound with a sulfonylurea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems.

• 1:05:36Speaker 06

  Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-5979, or visit zepbound.lily.com.

• 1:05:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hola a todos. Soy Jamie Lynn Sigler. Cuando me diagnosticaron tenía veintitantos años y todo mi mundo cambió por completo. Pero con el tiempo decidí que no iba a permitir que eso frenara mi vida. Quise tomar las riendas. Y después de hablar con mi médico sobre mis opciones, la elección para mí fue obvia. Boom! Eso es KISSIMTA. Obtenga más información sobre KISSIMTA o fotommap en kissimta.com.

• 1:06:13Holly Frey?

  Hey, it's Covino and Rich Davis from Covino and Rich. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it starts with a great deal on an off-road ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's most capable and longest-lasting trucks. Combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between. Built-on reputation for quality and reliability. Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which can mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places. The biggest game of the season, right here, right now. Starts Saturday strong. It's Big Noon Saturday on Fox. And here we go.

• 1:06:58Holly Frey?

  It all starts at 10 Eastern with Big Noon Kickoff, live with an epic pregame.

• 1:07:03Speaker 06

  The crowd, the atmosphere, this is what makes it special.

• 1:07:06Holly Frey?

  Then, it's America's number one game. What a hit. The best pregame, the best announcers, the biggest games.

• 1:07:12Speaker 00

  Down the sideline, touchdown.

• 1:07:14Holly Frey?

  It's Big Noon Saturday, noon Eastern on Fox.

• 1:07:18Speaker 00

  Okay, laundry stinks, literally. I mean, you could just keep buying new underwear. Not that I've ever done that. Or maybe sort your clothes into piles based on how re-wearable or filthy they are. Or just use Arm & Hammer Deep Clean. It's made for real-life stinks and stains. So even if you don't do laundry the quote "right way," Deep Clean will knock it out. I mean, it is from the number one liquid detergent brand that tackles more loads than any other. Come clean with Arm & Hammer Deep Clean. Number one claim based on total wash loads sold. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.