Kenneth T. Jackson - Robert Moses, Hero of New York?

I had a fascinating discussion about Robert Moses and The Power Broker with Professor Kenneth T. Jackson https://history.columbia.edu/person/jackson-kenneth-t/. He's the pre-eminent historian on NYC and author of Robert Moses and The Modern City: The Transformation of New York. He answers: * Why are we so much worse at building things today? * Would NYC be like Detroit without the master builder? * Does it take a tyrant to stop NIMBY? Watch on YouTube https://youtu.be/Gumo8zmgLqM. Listen on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/kenneth-t-jackson-robert-moses-hero-or-tyrant-of-new-york/id1516093381?i=1000585494087, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/7AQhELXdykYu4Eu30SKivh?si=TP7o8JSjSrCADStyQXbdvw, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/kenneth-jackson. Follow me on Twitter https://twitter.com/dwarkesh_sp for updates on future episodes. Timestamps (0:00:00) Preview + Intro (0:11:13) How Moses Gained Power (0:18:22) Moses Saved NYC? (0:27:31) Moses the Startup Founder? (0:32:34) The Case Against Moses Highways (0:50:30) NIMBYism (1:02:44) Is Progress Cyclical (1:11:13) Friendship with Caro (1:19:50) Moses the Longtermist? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkesh.com https://www.dwarkesh.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Robert Moses represented a past that's, you know, a time when we wanted to build bridges and super highways and things that pretty much has gone out. We're not building super highways now. We're not building vast bridges like Moses built all the time. Had Robert Moses not lived, not done what he did, New York would have followed the trail of maybe Detroit, essentially all the big roads, all the bridges, all the parks, the United Nations, Lincoln Center, the World Fairs of 1939 and 1964, and hundreds of other things he built. And I think it was the best book I've ever read. In broad strokes, it's correct. Robert

• 0:42Speaker 00

  Moses had more power than any urban figure in American history. He built incredible monuments. He was ruthless and arrogant and honest.

• 0:52Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay, I am really, really excited about this one. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Professor Kenneth T. Jackson about the life and legacy of Robert Moses. Professor Jackson is the preeminent historian on New York City. He was the director of the Herbert H. Lehman Center for American History and the Jacques Barzun Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University, where he has also chaired the Department of History. And we were discussing Robert Moses. Professor Jackson is the author and editor of Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York. Professor Jackson, welcome to the podcast.

• 1:36Speaker 00

  Well, thank you for having me.

• 1:38Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay, so many people will have heard of Robert Moses and be vaguely aware of him through that, through the popular biography of him by Robert Caro, The Power Broker. But most people will not be aware of the extent of his influence on New York City. Can you give a, can you give a kind of a summary of the things he was able to get built in New York City?

• 2:01Speaker 00

  One of the best comparisons I can think of is that, or Caro himself, when he compared him to Christopher Wren in London, he said, if you would see his monument, look around. It's almost more...

• 2:16Speaker 00

  Easier to talk about what Moses didn't do than what he did do. If you, all the roads, essentially all the big roads, all the bridges, all the parks, the United Nations, Lincoln Center, the World's Fairs of 1939 and 1964, and hundreds of other things he built. I mean, he didn't actually do it with his own two hands, but he was in charge. He got it done. And David Caro, who wrote a really great book. I think the book was flawed because I think

• 2:55Speaker 00

  Caro only looked at Moses's own documents and Moses had a very narrow view of himself. I mean, he thought he was a great man, but I mean, he didn't pay any attention to what was going on in LA very much, for example. But clearly, by any standard, he's the greatest builder in American history. There's nobody really in second place. And not only did he build and spend this vast amount of money, and he was in power for a long time, really a half century, more or less. So, and he, he was, had a singular focus. You know, he was married, but his personal life was not important to him. He, he, he did it without

• 3:37Speaker 00

  scandal, really. Even Caro admits that he really died with less than he started with. So, I mean, he wasn't, he wanted power. And he had, boy, did he have power. Technically was subservient to governors and mayors, but since he built so much, and since he had multiple jobs, that was part of his secret. He had, you know, as many as six, eight, 10 different things at once. If the mayor fired him, or got rid of him, he had all these different ways, which he was in charge of, that the mayor couldn't. So, you were afraid, you people were afraid of him, and they also respected him. He was very smart. And he

• 4:22Speaker 00

  worked for a dollar a year. So, what are you going to get him for? As Caro says,

• 4:30Speaker 00

  Nobody is ready to be compared with Robert Moses. In fact, compares him with an act of nature. In other words, the person you can compare him with is God. You know, that's the person. They, he put the rivers in, he put the hills in, he put the Allen in. Compare that to Moses, what Moses did. No other person could compare to that. You know, that's a little bit of exaggeration, but when you really think about Robert Moses and you read The Power Broker, you are stunned by the scope of his achievement, just stunned. And even beyond New York, when we build, think of the interstate highway system, which really starts in 1954, 55, 56, and which is, you know, forty something thousand miles of interstate

• 5:13Speaker 00

  highways. Those were built by Moses' men. People who had, in their young life, had worked with the parkways and expressways in and around New York City. So they were ready to go. And so Moses, and Moses also worked outside New York City, mostly inside New York City. But he achieved so much. So partly, you need to understand, it's not easy to get things done in New York. It's very, very dense, much, twice as dense as any place in the United States. And full of neighborhoods that feel like little cities and are little cities, and that don't, won't change, even today. A place like Austin,

• 5:58Speaker 00

  for example, is heavy into development, not New York. You want to build a tall building in New York, you got to fight for it, you know. So, and the fact that he did so much in the face of opposition speaks a lot to his methods and the way he, how did Moses do what he did? That is a huge question, because it isn't happening anymore. Certainly not in New York City.

• 6:22Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, and that's really why I actually wanted to talk to you and talk about this book, because, you know, The Power Broker was released in 1974, and at the time, New York was not doing well, which is to put it mildly. But today, the crisis we face is one where we haven't built significant public works in many American cities for decades. And so it's interesting to look back on a time when we could actually get a lot of public works built very quickly and very efficiently, and see if like, maybe we, maybe we got our characterization of the people at the time wrong. And that's where your 2007 book comes

• 7:02Dwarkesh Patel?

  in. So I'm curious, how was the book received 50 years after, or I guess 40 years after The Power Broker was released? What was the reception like? How has the, the intellectual climate around these issues changed in that time?

• 7:17Speaker 00

  The Power Broker is a stunning achievement, but you're right. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. He's thinking that in the 1970s, which is the, in New York's 400-year history, we think of the 1970s as being the bottom. Said he was bankrupt, crime was going up, corruption was all around, nothing was working very well. My argument, and the subtitle of the 2007 book, or that article, is Robert Moses and the Rise of New York. Arguing that had Robert Moses not lived, not done what he did, New York would have

• 7:56Speaker 00

  followed the trail of maybe Detroit, and St. Louis, and Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh, and most cities in the Northeast and Midwest, which really declined. New York City really hasn't declined. It's got more people now than it ever did. It's still a number one city in the world, really, most, by most of our standards. It's the global leader, maybe along with London. At one point...

• 8:24Speaker 00

  In the 1980s, we thought it might be Tokyo, which is the largest city in the world, but it's no longer considered competitive with New York and maybe I say London too, because New York and London are kind of alone at the top. But I think Robert Moses, public works, activities, I just don't know that you could have in New York City and not have expressways. I don't like the Cross Bronx Expressway either and don't want to drive on it. But how can you have a world in which you can't go from Boston to San Francisco? You had to have it. You have to have some highways and Carroll had it exactly wrong.

• 9:07Speaker 00

  He talked about Moses and the decline of public transit in New York. Actually, what you need to explain in New York is why public transit survived in New York, wherein most other American cities, the only people who use public transit are the losers, old, the disabled, the poor and stuff like. In New York City, rich people ride this. It's simply the most efficient place to get, way to get around and the quickest. And so that question needs, some of the things need to be turned on its head. How did he get it done? How did he do it without scandal? I mean, when you think about how the world is in our time, when everything has either

• 9:48Speaker 00

  a financial scandal or a sexual scandal attached to it, Moses didn't have scandals. He built the White Stone Bridge, for example, which is a gigantic bridge collecting, connecting the Bronx to Queens. It's beautiful. It was finished in the late 1930s on time and under budget, actually a little earlier. There's no such thing as that now. You're gonna do a big public works project and you're gonna do it on time? And also, he did it well. The Jones Beach, for example, is a generation's been considered one of the great public facilities on earth. I mean, it's gigantic. And he created it. You know, I know people will say, it's just sand and water.

• 10:33Speaker 00

  No, no, it's a little more complicated than that. So everything he did was complicated.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  He, I mean, I think Robert Carroll deserves a lot of credit for doing research on Moses, his childhood, his growing up.

• 10:51Speaker 00

  His assertion that he's the most important person ever to live in and around New York. And just think of Franklin Roosevelt and all the people who lived in and around New York. And Moses is in a category by himself, even though most Americans have never heard of Robert Moses. So his fame is still not, that book made him famous. And I think his legacy will continue to evolve and I think slightly improve as Americans realize that it's so hard, it's hard to build public works, especially in dense urban environments. And he did it.

• 11:33Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, there's so much to talk about there. But like one of the, one of the interesting things from Power Broker is Caro is trying to explain why governors and mayors who were hesitant about the power that Moses was gaining, continued to give him more power. And there's a section where he's talking about how FDR would keep giving him more positions and responsibilities, even though FDR and Moses famously had a, you know, a huge enmity. And he says, no governor could look at the difficulty of getting things built in New York and not admire and respect Moses' ability to do things, as he said, effectively, on time, under budget, and not, not like not need him essentially, right?

• 12:16Dwarkesh Patel?

  But I mean, speaking of scandal, you were talking about, you talked about how like he didn't take salary for his, you know, 12 concurrent government roles that he was on. But there's a, there's a, there's a very arresting anecdote in The Power Broker where I think he's 71 and his daughter gets cancer. And for the first time, I think he had to accept, maybe I'm getting the details wrong, but he had to accept salary for working on the World's Fair because, you know, he like, he didn't have enough, he was the most powerful person in New York and he didn't have enough money to like pay for his daughter's cancer. And even, even Caro himself says that a lot of the scandals that came later in his life, they were just like kind of trivial stuff, right? Like an acre of Central Park or the, you know, Shakespeare in the park.

• 13:01Dwarkesh Patel?

  It just, yeah, it like, it wasn't, the things that actually took him down were just trivial, trivial scandals.

• 13:08Speaker 00

  Well, in fact, when he finally was taken down, it took the efforts of a person who was almost considered the second most powerful person in the United States, David Rockefeller, and the governor of New York, both of whom are brothers, and they still had to lie to Moses to make him kind of get out of power in 1968. But it was time, and he exercised power into his 70s and 80s, and most of it was good. I mean, the bridges are remarkable. The bridges are gorgeous mostly. They're incredible. The Frognick Bridge, the Verazano-Naras

• 13:45Speaker 00

  Bridge, the Tribora Bridge, they're really works of art. And he liked to build things you could see. And I think the fact that he didn't take money was important to it. You know, he was not poor. I wouldn't say he was not wealthy in New York terms, but he was not a poor person. He went to Yale as a Jewish person, and this is say in the early 20th century, that's fairly unusual. And he lived well, so we can't say he's poor. But I think that Moses, that Carol was right in saying that what Moses was after, in the

• 14:27Speaker 00

  end, was not sex and not power, and not sex and not money. Power. He wanted power. And boy, did he get it.

• 14:36Dwarkesh Patel?

  Well, there's a good review of the book from, I'm not sure if I remember the last name, but it was Philip Lopgate or something?

• 14:44Speaker 00

  Lopate, I think.

• 14:45Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay. And they, you know, they had a, he made a good point, which was that the connotation of the word power is very negative, but it's kind of a modern thing, really, to have this sort of attitude towards power that like somebody who's just seeking it must necessarily, has like, must necessarily have suspicious motivations. If Moses believed, and in fact, he was probably right in believing, that he was just much more effective at building public works for, you know, the people who live in New York, was it, was it irrational of him, or was it even, was it selfish of him to like just desire to work 14-hour days for their 40 years on end in order to accumulate the power by which he could build more public

• 15:29Dwarkesh Patel?

  works? So there's a way of looking at it where this pursuit of power is not, not itself, you know, troubling.

• 15:36Speaker 00

  Well, first of all, I just need to make a point that it was not just New York City. I mean, Jones Beach is on Long Island, a lot of those highways, the Northern State Parkway, the Southern State Parkway are built outside the city. And also, big projects, the Power Authority in upstate New York. He also was consultant around the world in cities in transportation. So his influence was really felt far beyond New York City. And of course, New York City is so big and so important. I think also that we might want to think about, at least I think so, what do you want to say, the counterfactual argument. Can you imagine? I can remember when I was in the Air Force, we lived next door to a couple from New York City.

• 16:21Speaker 00

  We didn't know New York City at the time. And I can't remember whether she or he was from the Bronx or Brooklyn, but they had, they made us understand how incredibly much he must have loved her. To go to Brooklyn or the Bronx to see her and pick her up for dates and stuff like this, you couldn't get there. I mean, it would take you three hours to go from the Rockaways in Brooklyn to somewhere in the northern Bronx. But the roads that Moses built, you know, I know at rush hour they're jammed, but you know, right this minute on a Sunday, you can whiz around New York City on these expressways that Moses built.

• 17:02Speaker 00

  It's hard to imagine New York without... The only thing Moses didn't do was the subway. And many people have criticized him because the subways were deteriorated between the town they were built in the early part of the 20th century, in 1974, when Carol wrote The Power Broker. But so had public transit systems all over the United States. And the public transit system in New York is now better than it was 50 years ago. So that trajectory has changed. And all these other cities, you know, Pittsburgh used to have 600,000 people. Now it has 300,000. Cleveland used to have 900,000 and something. Now it's below five.

• 17:47Speaker 00

  Detroit used to have 2 million. Now it's 600 and something thousand. St. Louis used to have 850,000. Now it's 300. I mean, the steep drop in all these other cities in the Midwest and Northeast, even Washington and even Boston and Philadelphia, they all declined, except New York City, which even though it was way bigger than any of them in 1950, is bigger now than it was then. More people crammed into this small space. And Moses had something to do with that.

• 18:21Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You write in the book, and I apologize for quoting you back to yourself, but you write, "Had the city not undertaken a massive program of public works between 1924 and 1970, had it not built the 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 a capital of the 20th century." I would like to make this connection more explicit. So what is the reason for thinking that if New York hadn't done urban renewal and hadn't built the more than 600 miles of highways that Moses built there, that New York would have declined like these other cities in the Northeast and the Midwest?

• 19:05Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, you could argue, first of all, and friends of mine have argued this, that New York is not like other cities. It's a world city and has been. And what happens to the rest of the United States is, I accept a little bit of that, but not all of it. Who say, well, New York is just New York. And so whatever happens here is not necessarily because of Moses or different from Detroit. But I think it's important to realize its history has been different from other American cities. Most American cities.

• 19:37Speaker 00

  Especially the older cities have been in relative decline for seventy-five years. And in some ways, New York has too, and it was its relative dominance of the United States is less now than because there's been a shift south and west in the United States. But the prosperity of New York, the desire of people to live in it. And after all, one of its problems is it's so expensive. Well, one reason it's expensive is people want to live there. If they didn't want to live there, it would be like Detroit, it'd be perfectly free. You know what I mean? So there are answers to these issues. But Moses's ways, I think, were interesting. First of all, he didn't, he didn't worry about legalities.

• 20:22Speaker 00

  You know, he would start a expressway through somebody's property and dare a judge to tell him to stop after the construction had already started. And most of the time, Moses, it was kind of like Hitler. It was just, I don't, I don't, that's a, I don't mean to say like Hitler. But what I mean is, but you have such confidence. You just do things and dare other people to change it. You know what I mean? I'm gonna do it. And most people don't have that. I think there's a little bit of that in Trump, but I, I, not as much. I mean, I don't think he has nearly the genius or, or brains of Moses.

• 21:03Speaker 00

  But, um, but there's something to self-confidence. There's something to having a broad vision.

• 21:13Speaker 00

  Moses liked cities, but he didn't like neighborhoods or people. In other words, I don't think he loved New York City. Here is the person who's more involved. He really thought everybody should live in suburbs and drive cars. And that was the world of the future, and he was gonna make that possible. And he thought all those old law tenements in New York, which is really anything built before nineteen oh one.

• 21:43Speaker 00

  Where it's slums and they didn't have hot and cold water, didn't have, often didn't have bathrooms. He thought they should be destroyed. He didn't, and his vision was public housing, high-rise public housing was an improvement. Now, I think around the United States, we don't think these high-rise public housing projects are so wonderful, but he thought he was doing the right thing.

• 22:09Speaker 00

  And he was so arrogant, he didn't listen to people like Jane Jacobs, who fought him and said, "You're saying Greenwich Village is a slum? Are you kidding me?" I mean, he thought it was a slum. Go to Greenwich Village today, try to buy anything for under a million dollars. I mean, it doesn't exist. You know what I mean? I mean Greenwich Village and, and he, he saw old things, old neighborhoods, walking is hopelessly out of date. And he was wrong. He was wrong about a lot of his vision. And now we understand that. And all around the country, we're trying to revitalize downtowns and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and gasoline and cars. But Moses didn't see the world that way.

• 22:54Speaker 00

  It's interesting, he never himself drove a car. Can you believe that the man who had more influence on the American car culture, probably, probably even than Henry Ford, himself was always driven, he was chauffeur, you know, in fact, in fact, he was so busy that Carol talks about him is having two limousines behind each other. And he would have a secretary in one and he would be dealing with business and writing letters and things like this. And then she would have all she could do, they would pull off to the side of the road. She would get out of his car. The, the car that was following would discharge the secretary in that car. They would switch places and the fresh secretary would get in the backseat.

• 23:39Speaker 00

  Moses and they would continue to work and the first secretary would go to type up she, whatever she had to do. He worked all the time. He really didn't have much of a private life.

• 23:53Speaker 00

  There are not many people like Robert Moses, there are people like Robert Moses, but not so many. And he achieved his, his, his, his ideal.

• 24:04Speaker 00

  I think that there are a lot of so many ironies there. Not only did he not drive himself, he didn't appreciate so much the the density of New York, which many people now love, and it's getting more dense. They're building tall buildings everywhere. And he didn't really appreciate the diversity, the toleration. He himself was, he didn't care about that. But it worked. And I just think we have to appreciate the fact that he did what was impossible, really impossible, and nobody else could have done what he did. And if we hadn't done it then, he sure as heck wouldn't be able to do it in the 21st century,

• 24:45Speaker 00

  when people are even more litigious. You know, you try to, you try to change the color of a door in New York City, and there'll be, you try to do something positive, like build a free swimming pool, fix up an old armory and turn it into a public, there'll be people who'll fight you. I'm not kidding this. And Moses didn't care. He says, "I'm gonna do this," when he built the Cross Bronx Expressway, which in some ways is, it was horrible what he did to these people. But again, Carol mischaracterizes what happened, but it's a dense, working-class, let's call it Jewish neighborhood

• 25:24Speaker 00

  in the early 1950s, and Moses decides we need an interstate highway, or a big highway going right through it. Well, he sent masses of people, letters, to send, "Get out in 90 days." He didn't mean 91 days. He meant, he didn't mean, "Let's argue about it for four years. Let's go legit." Moses meant, "The bulldozers will be bulldozing." And that kind of attitude, we just don't have anymore. And it's kind of funny now to think back on it, but it wasn't funny to the people who got evicted. But again, as I say, it's hard to imagine a New York City without the Cross Bronx Expressway.

• 26:05Speaker 00

  Even they tore down five blocks of dense buildings, tore them down, and built this road right through it.

• 26:14Speaker 00

  You live, and they didn't worry about where they're going to rehouse them. I mean, they did, but it didn't work.

• 26:21Speaker 00

  And now it's so busy, it's crowded all the time. So what does this prove? That we need more roads, but you can't have more roads in New York. Because if you build more roads, what are you going to do with the cars? Right now, the problem is, there's so many cars in the city, there's nothing to do. It's easy to get around in New York, but what are you going to do with the car? You know, the car culture has the seeds of its own destruction. You know, cars, just parking them or putting them in a garage is a problem. And Moses didn't foresee those. He foresee you're all going to live in the Long Island suburbs, or Westchester suburbs, or New Jersey suburbs. Park your car in your house and come in the city to work. Now, the city is becoming a place to live, more than a place to work.

• 27:06Speaker 00

  So what they're doing in New York as fast as they can is converting office buildings into residential units. He would never have seen that, that people would want to live in the city, who had options, that they would reject the single-family house and choose high-rise and choose the convenience of going outside and walking to a delicatessen, over-rover driving to a grocery store. It's a world he never saw.

• 27:30Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, like, the thing you pointed out earlier about him having the two limousines, and then the enormous work ethic, and then he had the 90-day eviction. I mean, I'm a programmer, and I can recognize this trope immediately, right? Robert Moses was a startup founder, but in government. You know, that attitude is like, yeah, it's like Silicon Valley. That's like, we all recognize that.

• 27:54Speaker 00

  And I think we should, we should go back to what you said earlier about, why was it that governors or mayors couldn't tell him what to do? Because there are many scenes in The Power Broker where he will go to the mayor, who wants to do something else, and Moses would, damn it. He'd say, "Damn it," throw his pages on the desk and say, "Sign this. This is my resignation."

• 28:21Speaker 00

  You know, okay, and I'm out of here because the mayors and governors love to open bridges and highways and, and do it efficiently and beautifully. And Moses could do that. Moses could deliver. And the, and the workers loved him because he paid union wages, good wages to his workers. And he got things done. And, and things like, more than 700 playgrounds. And it wasn't just grand things. And even though people criticized the 1964 World's Fair as a failure, and financially it was a failure, but still, tens of millions of

• 29:05Speaker 00

  people went there and had a good time. You know, I mean, even some of the things were supposedly were failures. Failures according to whom? According to the investment banker, maybe, but not to the people who went there.

• 29:20Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right. Yeah. And I mean, the point about the governors and mayors needing him, it was especially important to have somebody who could like work that fast if you're getting and get reelected in four years or two years. You need somebody who can get public works done faster than they're done today. Right? If you want to be there for the opening. Yeah, exactly.

• 29:36Speaker 00

  And it's important to realize, to say that Moses did try public office once.

• 29:41Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:41Speaker 00

  He ran for governor. And I, I think it's true that he lost by more than anybody in the history of New York. It was not, you know, he was not an effective public speaker. He was not soft and friendly and warm and cuddly. That's not Robert Moses. The voters rejected him. But, but people who had power, and also Wall Street, because you had to, you had to issue bonds. And one of the ways that Moses had power was he created this thing called the Traboura Bridge and Tunnel Authority to build the Traboura Bridge. Well, now, if in Portland, Oregon, you want to build a bridge or a road, you issue a couple hundred million dollars worth of bonds to the public and assign a value to it. Interest

• 30:26Speaker 00

  rate that's paid off by the revenue that comes in from the bridge or the road or whatever it is. Normally.

• 30:34Speaker 00

  Before, normally, you would build a public works and pay for it itself on its user fees. And when the user fees paid it off, it ended. But what Moses, who was called the best build drafter in Albany, which was a Moses term, he said, he was somewhere down in paragraph thirteen, section Z, say, "And the chairman can only be removed for cause." What that meant was, when you buy a bond for the Triborough Bridge or something else, you're in a contract that's supported by the Supreme Court. This is a financial deal you're making with somebody.

• 31:18Speaker 00

  And part of the contract was the chairman gets to stay unless he does something wrong. Well, Moses was careful not to do anything wrong. And it also would continue. You would get the bond for the Triborough Bridge, but rather than pay off the Triborough Bridge, he would build another project. It would give him the right to continually build this chain of events. And so he had this massive pot of money from all these initially nickels and dimes. Brazil made up a lot of money, the thirties and forties and fifties and sixties, to spend more money and build more bridges and build more roads. And that's where he had his power. It was, and the Wall Street, the big business, loved him because they're issuing the bonds.

• 32:01Speaker 00

  The unions loved him because they're paying the investors. Now, what Carol says is that Moses allowed the investors an extra quarter percent, I think a quarter percent or half percent on the bonds. But they all sold out, you know, so everybody was happy. And, you know, was that crooked? It wasn't really illegal, but it's the way that people do that today. If you're issuing a bond, you got to figure out what interest am I going to pay on this that will attract investors?

• 32:32Dwarkesh Patel?

  Now. And the crucial thing about these tales of graft is that it never was about Moses trying to get rich, right? It was always him trying to push through a project. And you can, there's, I mean, obviously, that can be disturbing, but it is a completely different category of thing, especially when you remember that this was like a corrupt time in New York history, right? This is like after Tammany Hall and so on. So it's a completely different from somebody using their projects to get themselves rich. But I do want to, you know, actually talk in more detail about the, the impact of these roads. So, you know, like, obviously, we can't, the current system we have today, where we just kind of treat cities as living museums, with NIMBYism and historical preservation, that's not optimal.

• 33:14Dwarkesh Patel?

  But there are examples, at least if Carol is right, about Moses just throwing out thousands of people carelessly. You know, famously, in that chapter on the one mile, how Moses could have diverted one of the Cross Bronx Expressway one mile and prevented thousands of people from getting needlessly evicted. But, so I'm just gonna like, list off a few criticisms of his highway building, and then you can respond to them in any order you want. So one of the main criticisms that Carol makes is that Moses refused to add mass transit to his highways, which would have helped deal with the traffic problem and the car problem and all these other problems, at a time when getting the right of way and doing the construction would have been much cheaper.

• 33:59Dwarkesh Patel?

  And because of his dislike for mass transit, he just refused to do that. And also, the prolific building of highways contributed to, contributed to urban sprawl, it contributed to congestion, it contributed to neighborhoods getting torn apart, if a highway would, you know, cross them. So a whole list of criticisms of these highways. I'll let you take it in any order you want.

• 34:26Speaker 00

  Well, first of all, Moses' response was, "I wasn't in charge of subways." So if you think the subway's deteriorated or didn't build enough, find out who was in charge of it and blame that person. I was in charge of highways and I built those. So that's the first thing.

• 34:40Dwarkesh Patel?

  Before you answer that, can I just ask, so on that particular point, it is true that he wasn't in charge of mass transit, but also, he wasn't in charge of roads until he made himself responsible for roads, right? So if he chose to, he could have made himself responsible for mass transit and taken care of it.

• 34:56Speaker 00

  Maybe, although I think the other thing about it is putting Moses in a broader historical concept. He was swimming with the tide of history. And there was history when he was building, was building Ford Motor Company and General Motors and Chrysler Corporation, and building cars by the millions. I mean, the automobile industry in the United States was huge. People thought any kind of rail transit was obsolete and on the way out anyway. So let's just build roads. I mean, that's what the public wanted. He built what the public wanted. It's not without, looking historically, I don't think we did the right thing. But we needed to join the 20th century.

• 35:41Speaker 00

  New York could have stayed as quaint, I don't know, quaint is not the right word, but it's a distinctly different kind of place where everybody walks. I just don't think it would have been the same kind of city, because there are people who are attached to their cars in New York. And so the sprawl in New York, which is enormous, nobody's saying it wasn't, spreads over 31 counties, an area about as large as the state of Connecticut, about as large as the Netherlands is metropolitan New York. But it's still relatively...

• 36:21Speaker 00

  I don't want to say compact, but everybody knows where the center is. It's not that anybody grows up in New York at 16 and thinks that the world is in some mall, you know, three miles away. They all know there is a center and that's where it is. It's called Manhattan and that's New York and Moses didn't change that for all of his roads. They're still in New York, a definite center, skyscrapers and everything in the middle. And it's true.

• 36:53Speaker 00

  Public transit did decline, but you know, those, and I like Chicago, by the way, and they have a

• 37:01Speaker 00

  rail transit from O'Hare down to Dan Ryan, not to Dan Ryan, but the JFK Expressway, I think. And it works sort of, but you got to walk aways to get on, you got to walk blocks to get in the middle of the expressway and catch a train there. It's not like in New York where you just go down some steps. I mean, New York subway is much bigger than Chicago and more widely used and more. And the key thing about New York, and so I think what Carol was trying to explain, and your question suggests this, is was Moses responsible for the decline of public transit?

• 37:41Speaker 00

  Well, he was building cars and roads and bridges. So in that sense, a little bit, yes. But if you look at New York compared to the rest of the United States, it used to be that maybe 20% of all the transit riders in the United States were in the New York area. Now it's 40%. So if you're looking at the United States, what you have to explain is why is New York different from the rest of the United States? Why is it that, that when I was chairman of the A president of the New York Historical Society, we had rich trustees. And I would tell them, well, I got here on a subway or something. They would think, I would say, how do you think I got here? Do you know what I mean? I mean, these are people who are close to billionaires and they're saying, they used a subway.

• 38:24Speaker 00

  If you're in Lower Manhattan and you're trying to get to Midtown and it's raining, it's five o'clock. You've got to be a fool to try to get in your own limousine. It isn't going to get you there very quickly. A subway will. So there are reasons for it, and I think Moses didn't destroy public transit. He, he didn't help it, but his argument was he did. That, and that's, that's an important distinction, I think. But he was swimming with history. He built what the public wanted. I think if he had built public transit, he would have found it tougher to build. Just for example, Cincinnati built a subway system. A tunnel all through the city. It never has opened. They built it.

• 39:07Speaker 00

  You can still see the holes in the ground where it's supposed to come out. By the time they built it, people weren't riding trains anymore. And so it's there now and they don't know what to do with it. And that's 80 years ago. So it's a very complicated, I don't mean to make these issues. They're much more complex than I'm speaking of. And I just think it's unfair to blame Moses for the problems of the city. I think he did as much as anybody to try to bring the city into the 21st century, which he didn't live to. But you've got to adopt, you've got to have a hybrid model in the world now.

• 39:49Speaker 00

  And I think the model that America needs to follow is a model where we reduce our dependence on the cars and somehow ride buses more or use the internet more, whatever it is. But stop using so much fossil fuels so that we destroy our environment and.

• 40:08Speaker 00

  And New York by far is the most energetic, efficient place in the United States. Mainly because you live in tall buildings, you have hot floors. It doesn't really cost much to heat places because you're heating the floor below you and above you. And you don't have outside walls and you walk. New Yorkers are thinner. Many more people take buses and subways in New York than anywhere else in the United States. Not just in absolute terms, in relative terms. So that they're helping. It's probably a healthier lifestyle to walk around. And I think that's, I think we're rediscovering it. For example, if you come to New York between Thanksgiving and Christmas,

• 40:51Speaker 00

  there's so many tourists in the city, I'm not making this up, that there is gridlock on the sidewalks.

• 40:59Speaker 00

  The police have to direct the traffic. And in part, it's because a Detroit grandmother wants to bring her granddaughter to New York to see what Hudson's, which was a great department store in Detroit, or in any city, it could be riches in Atlanta, Fox, G Fox in Hartford. Every city had these giant departments and windows where there's Santa Clauses and stuff like this. You can still go to New York and see that. You can say, Jane, this is the way it used to be in Detroit. People ringing the bells and looking at the store windows and things like that. A mall can't recapture that, it just can't. You try, but it's not the same thing.

• 41:41Speaker 00

  And so I think that in a way Moses didn't not, not only did he not destroy New York, I think he gets a little bit of credit for saving it because it might have been on the way to Detroit. Again, I'm not saying that it would have been Detroit because Detroit's almost empty. But Baltimore, it wasn't just Baltimore, it's Cleveland, it's every place. There's nobody there anymore. And even in New York, the department stores have mostly closed, not all of them. And so it's not the same as it was 80 years ago, but it's closer to it than anywhere else.

• 42:16Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay, so yeah, so I'm actually very curious to get your opinion on the following question. Given the fact that you are an expert on New York history and you know, you've written the encyclopedia, literally written the encyclopedia on New York City.

• 42:30Speaker 00

  Eight hundred people wrote the encyclopedia. I just took all the credit for it.

• 42:33Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay.

• 42:34Speaker 00

  I was the editor in chief, so.

• 42:36Dwarkesh Patel?

  Um, so I'm actually curious, is Caro actually right that, I mean, you talked about the importance just earlier about counterfactual history. So I'm curious if Caro is actually right about the claim that the neighborhoods through which Moses built his highways were destroyed in a way that neighborhoods which were in touch by the highways weren't. Sorry for the confusing phrasing there, but basically, um, was there like a, looking back on all these neighborhoods? Is there a clear counterfactual negative impact for on the neighborhoods in which Moses built his highways and bridges and so on?

• 43:10Speaker 00

  Moses may, I mean, Carol makes that argument mostly about East Tremont and places like that in the Bronx where the Cross Bronx Expressway passed through. And he says, this perfectly wonderful Jewish neighborhood that was not racially prejudiced and everybody was happy and not leaving was destroyed by Moses. Well, first of all, as a historian of New York City, or for that matter, any city, if a student comes to you and says, that's what I found out, you said, well, you know, that runs counter to the experience of every city. So let's do a little more work on that. Well, first of all, if you look at the census tracts or the residential security maps of HJ, you know, it's not true. First of all, the Jews were leaving and had nothing to do with the thing. They didn't love blacks, as they did.

• 43:55Speaker 00

  And also, if you look at other Jewish, and the Bronx was called the Jewish borough at the time. Those neighborhoods that weren't on the Cross Bronx Expressway all emptied out mostly. So the Bronx itself was a part of New York City that followed the pattern of Detroit and Baltimore and Cleveland. It's now Bronx is now coming back, but it's, it's a different place. But, um, so I, I think it's, well, I've said this in public and I think it's true. Carol wouldn't know those neighborhoods if he landed there by parachute. You know, they're much better than he ever said they were. You know, he acted like if you. Went outside near the Bronx County courthouse, she needed a wagon train to go.

• 44:40Speaker 00

  I've taken my students there dozens of times and shown them the people, the old ladies eating on the benches and stuff like this. Nobody's mugging them. You know, he just has an outsider's view. He didn't know the places he was writing about. But, uh, but I think Mo- I think Harold was right about some things. Moses was personally a jerk. You can make it stronger than that. But I mean, he was not your friendly grandfather. He was arrogant. He was self-centered. He thought he knew the truth and you don't. He, um, was vindictive, uh,

• 45:23Speaker 00

  ruthless. Uh, but some of those were good, you know, you know, now he would, his strategies, his strategies and some were good. He made people building a, a beach or a building feel like you're building a cathedral. You're building something great and I'm going to pay you for it. And let's, let's make it good. Let's make it as best as we can. That itself is a real trick. How do you get people to think of their jobs as more than a job, as something else? And even a beach or a wall or something like that to say it's good. And he also paid them. So that's important that he does that. And he's, he's making improvements. He said he was improving things for the people. And, you know, it's not every, he, I don't know if you want to talk about Jane Jacobs.

• 46:09Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yes.

• 46:09Speaker 00

  Who was his nemesis.

• 46:11Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yep.

• 46:11Speaker 00

  And, and I tend to vote with Jane Jacobs. Jane Jacobs and I agree on a lot of things, or did before she died a few years ago. But, um, they didn't, Jane Jacobs saw the city as intricate stores and people living and walking and knowing each other and eyes on the street and all these kinds of, Moses didn't see that at all. He saw the city as a traffic problem. How do we tear this down, build something big and get people the hell out of here? And that was a mistake. Um, Moses made mistakes.

• 46:49Speaker 00

  But, uh, but what Moses was doing was what everybody in the United States was doing, just not as big, and not as ruthless, and not as quick. It was not like Moses built a different kind of world that exists in Kansas City. That's exactly what they did in Kansas City, or every other city. Blow the damn roads to the black neighborhoods, uh, build the expressway interchanges. My hometown of Memphis crisscrossed with big streets. Those neighborhoods gone. They're even more extensive in places like Memphis and Kansas City and New Orleans than they are in New York, because New York builds relatively fewer of them.

• 47:29Speaker 00

  It's still huge what he built, but, but you would not know from the power broker that Los Angeles exists. Actually, Los Angeles was building freeways too. Or he says that New York got more federal money than, than, you know, you say, well, not true. I've had students work on Chicago, and Chicago's getting more money per person than New York for some of these projects. So some of the claims, no doubt, he got those from Moses's own records. But, you know, you gotta, if you're gonna write a book like this, you gotta know what's going on other places. Anyway, let's go back to your questions.

• 48:12Dwarkesh Patel?

  No, no, I, I actually was, that was one of the things I was actually gonna ask you about, so it's glad to get your opinion on that. You know, actually, in preparing for this interview and trying to like, learn more about the, the impact of these different projects, I was like, trying to find, um, the economic literature on the value of these highways. And so there was, um, there was a, a National Bureau of Economic Research paper by Morgan Foy, or at least a digest by Morgan Foy, where he says that, um, so he's talking about the gains, economic gains from highways, and he says, um, "The gains tend to be largest in areas where roads connect large economic hubs where few alternative routes exist." And he goes on to say, "Two segments near New York City have welfare benefits exceeding

• 48:57Dwarkesh Patel?

  $500 million." Expanding the Long Island Expressway had an estimated economic value of $719 million, which I think was Moses. And he says, "Of the top 10 segments with the highest rate of return, seven are in New York City area." So it turns out that seven of the top 10 most valuable highway segments in America are in New York. And reading that, it makes me suspect that like there must have, I mean, the way Carol paints Moses' planning process, it's just kind of very impulsive and feelings-based, and almost in some cases like out of malice towards poor people. But like, given that century later, it seems that many of the most valuable tracks of

• 49:42Dwarkesh Patel?

  highways were planned and built exactly how Moses envisioned. It makes you think that there was some sort of like actual intelligent deliberation and thought that was put into where they were placed.

• 49:53Speaker 00

  I think that's true. And I'm not saying that they don't have, the automobile didn't have an economic impact. That's what Moses was building for.

• 50:02Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:03Speaker 00

  You know, he would, he would probably endorse that idea.

• 50:06Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:07Speaker 00

  But I think that what, what we're looking at now in the 21st century is the high value put on places that Moses literally thought were a slum. He was going to run an expressway from Brooklyn through Lower Manhattan to New Jersey and knock down all these buildings in Greenwich Village that people love now, love. I mean, you couldn't, movie stars, people crowd into those neighborhoods to live, and that he saw it as a slum. Well, Moses was simply wrong. And Carol puts him to task for that. I think that's true.

• 50:45Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay. Professor Jackson, now I want to discuss how the process of city planning and building projects has changed since Moses' time. We spent some good amount of time actually discussing what it was like, what Moses actually did in his time. But, I mean, last year, I believe, you wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal talking about how the 27-story building in Manhattan was still, was put in limbo because the parking lot which we would replace was part of a historic district. So, yeah, well, what is it like to actually build a skyscraper, or a highway, or a bridge, or anything of that sort? In today's New York City.

• 51:29Speaker 00

  Well, I do think in in the larger context, it's probably fair to say it's tougher to build in New York City than any any other city. I mean, yeah, you know, a little precious suburb, you may not define skyscraper, but I mean, as far as the city is concerned, there'll be more opposition in New York than anywhere else. And they're just more, it's it's more dense. So just to unload and load stuff to build a building, how do you do that? You know, you got to trucks have to park on the street. Everything is more complicated than thus more expensive.

• 52:07Speaker 00

  I think a major difference between Robert Moses this time and our own, in Robert Moses this time,

• 52:15Speaker 00

  historic preservation was as yet little known and little understood and little supported. And the view generally was

• 52:26Speaker 00

  building is good, roads are good, houses are good.

• 52:32Speaker 00

  And they're all on the way to a more modern and better world.

• 52:39Speaker 00

  We don't have the same kind of faith in the future that they did.

• 52:45Speaker 00

  So, you know, we kind of like it like it is. Let's just sit on it. But so Moses, so I think we should say that Moses had

• 52:53Speaker 00

  easier time of it than he would have had he lived today. But still wasn't an easy time, but easier than today.

• 53:02Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. Well, actually, can you talk more about what that change in, I guess, philosophy has been since then? That I feel like that's been one of the themes of this podcast to like, I see how our cultural attitude towards progress and technology have changed.

• 53:17Speaker 00

  Well, I think one reason why the power broker, Robert Carroll's famous book, received such popular acclaim is it fits in with book readers' opinions today, which is old is better. I mean, also, you got to think about New York City. If you say it's a pre-war apartment, you mean it's a better apartment. You know, everything, you know, the walls are solid plaster, not fiberboard and stuff like that. So.

• 53:46Speaker 00

  Old has a reverence in New York that doesn't have in Japan. In Japan, they tear down houses every fifteen years. So it's a whole different thing. We, we tend to, in this new country, new culture, we tend to value oldness in some places. And especially in a place that's old, like New York City. I mean, most Americans don't realize that New York is not only the most dense American city and the largest, but also really the oldest. I mean, I know there's St. Augustine, but that's, that's taken the concept of what's a city to a pretty extreme things. And then there's Jamestown in Virginia, but there's nobody there. Literally nobody there. And then, and then where the pilgrims landed in Massachusetts,

• 54:30Speaker 00

  Plymouth Plantation, that's totally rebuilt as a kind of a theme park. So for a place that's a city, and Santa Fe a little bit, um, in Mexico, but it was a wide place on the road until after World War II. So there are places that would be awesome. If you like cities, New York is really old. And it's never valued history, but the historic preservation movement here is very strong.

• 54:55Dwarkesh Patel?

  What is the reason for its resurgence? Is it just that, because I mean, it's, it's had a big impact on many cities, right? Like I'm in San Francisco right now. And obviously like you can't tear down one of these Victorian houses to build the, uh, build the housing that like the city massively needs. Why, why have we like gained a reverence for anything that was both before like eighty years?

• 55:17Speaker 00

  I'm surprised because just think of the two most expensive places in the United States. It could change a little bit from year to year, but usually San Francisco and New York.

• 55:28Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right.

• 55:29Speaker 00

  And really, if you want to make it more affordable, if you want to drop the price of popsicles on your block, sell more popsicles, have more people selling popsicles, then the price will fall. But somehow they say they're going to build luxury housing. When actually if you build any housing. It'll put downward pressure on prices, even if it's super luxury. But anyway, most Americans don't understand that. So they oppose change, and especially so in New York and San Francisco, on the basis that change means gentrification. And of course, there has been a lot of gentrification. In World War II, or right after, San Francisco was a working-class city. It really was. And

• 56:10Speaker 00

  huge numbers of short and longshoremen lived there. Now, San Francisco's become the headquarters, really, in Silicon Valley. But a headquarters city is a tech revolution, and it's become very expensive, and very homeless. It's very complex, not easy to understand, even if you're in the middle of it.

• 56:31Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah. Okay, so if he could get a Robert Moses back again today, what major mega project do you think New York needs today that a Moses-like figure could build?

• 56:44Speaker 00

  Well, if you think really broadly, and you take climate change seriously, as I think most people do, probably to build some sort of an infrastructure to prevent rising water from sinking the city. It's doable. You'd have to, like New Orleans, in order to save New Orleans, you had to flood Mississippi and some other places. So usually, there is a downside somewhere. But you could, that would be a huge project, to maybe build a bridge, not a bridge, a land bridge from Brooklyn to New York to Manhattan, to prevent water coming in from the ocean, because New York is on the ocean. And to think of something

• 57:29Speaker 00

  like that's really big. You know, some of the other big infrastructure projects, like they're talking about another tunnel

• 57:37Speaker 00

  under the river, Hudson River, from New Jersey to New York. The problem with that is, there are already too many cars in that.

• 57:45Speaker 00

  Anything that makes it easier to bring cars in the Manhattan. Because, you know, if you've not been to New York, you don't really understand this, but there's no place for anything. And if you bring more cars in, what are you going to do with them? If you build parking garages just for all the cars that could come into the city, then you'd be building over the whole city, there'd be no reason to come here because there'd all be parking garages or parking lots. So, New York City simply won't work if you reduce the density, or you get rid of underground transportation. Because it's all about people moving around underneath the streets and not taking up space as they do it. So it won't work, it won't work.

• 58:29Speaker 00

  And of course, it's not the only city, Tokyo wouldn't work either. Or lots of cities in the world won't work, increasingly, without not just public transportation, but underground public transportation. Where you can get it out of the way of traffic and stuff like that. Moses probably could have done that. He probably, he wouldn't have loved it as much as he loved bridges because he wanted you to see what he built. And there was an argument in the power broker, but he didn't really want the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel built because he wanted to build a bridge that everybody could see. So he may not have done it with such enthusiasm. I actually believe that Moses was first and foremost a builder.

• 59:11Speaker 00

  He really wanted to build things, change things. If you said, "We'll pay you to build tunnels," I think he would have built tunnels. Who knows? He wasn't, never was offered that. That wasn't the time in which he lived.

• 59:26Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, okay. And then I'm curious if you think that today, to get rid of, I guess, the red tape and the NIMBY-ism, would it just be enough for one man to accumulate as much influence as Moses had and then to push through some things? Or does there need to be some sort of systemic reform? Because when Moses took power, of course, there was also that Tammany Hall machine that he had to run through, right? Is that just what's needed today to get through the, you know, the bureaucracy? Or is something more needed?

• 59:54Speaker 00

  Well, I don't think Robert Moses, with all of his...

• 59:59Speaker 00

  Talents and personality, I don't think he could do in the 21st century what he did in the middle of the 20th century. I think he would have done a lot, maybe more than anybody else. But also, I think his methods, his really bullying messages, really, really, he bullied, he bullied people, including powerful people. I don't think that would work quite as easy today. But I do think we need it today. And I think even today, you know, we find even now, we have in New York, just the beginnings of leftists, I'm thinking of AOC, the woman who led the campaign against Amazon in New York, saying, well,

• 1:00:43Speaker 00

  we need some development. If we want to make housing more affordable, somebody's got to build something. It's not going to become more affordable because you say you want affordable housing. You got to build affordable housing, and especially you got to build more of it. So we have to allow people, we have to overrun the overturn the NIMBYism to say, well, even today, for all of our concern about environmental change, we have to work together. I mean, in some ways, we have to, we have to believe that we're in some ways in the same boat. And it won't work if we put more people in the boat, but don't make the boat any bigger. And

• 1:01:22Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. But when people discuss Moses and the power accumulated, they often talk about the fact that he took so much power away from democratically elected officials, and he centralized so much power in himself. And, you know, obviously, the power broker talks a great deal about the harms of that kind of centralization. But I'm curious, having studied the history of New York, what are the benefits if there can be one coordinated, cohesive plan for the entire city? So if there's one person who's designing all the bridges, all the highways, all the parks, is something more made possible that can't be possible with like multiple different branches and people have their own unique visions? I don't know if that question makes sense, but

• 1:02:01Speaker 00

  That's a big question. And you've got to put a lot of trust into the grand plan, or especially if a massive area of 20, 25 million people, bigger than the city, I'm most what you're really talking about. Now,

• 1:02:17Speaker 00

  I think, I think that in some ways we've gone too far in the ability to obstruct change, to stop it. And we need change. Change, I mean, houses deteriorate and roads deteriorate, and sewers deteriorate. We have to build into our system the ability to improve them. And we have little, now in New York, we respond to emergencies. All of a sudden, a water main breaks, the street collapses, and then they stop everything, stop the water main break and repair the street and whatever it is. Meanwhile, in a hundred other places,

• 1:02:58Speaker 00

  it's leaking, it's just not leaking enough to make the road collapse. But the problem is there every day, every minute.

• 1:03:05Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right, yeah, yeah. I'm curious, like, as a professor, I mean, you've like studied American history. Do you just see this as a cyclical thing, where you have periods where maybe one person has too much power, to periods where there's like dispersed vitocracy and sclerosis, and then you're just gonna go through these cycles? Or how do you see the, in the grand context of things, how do you see the, like, where we are, where we were during Moses, and where we might be in the future?

• 1:03:32Speaker 00

  Well, you're right to say that much of life is cyclical. And there is a swing back and forth. But having said that, I think a person like Robert Moses is unusual. Partly because, you know, he might have gone on to become a hedge fund person, or they didn't have hedge funds, he was around, but you know, new competitor Goldman Sachs, I mean, he could have done a lot of things. Maybe been a general. He wanted to have power and control.

• 1:04:07Speaker 00

  And I think that's harder to accumulate now. We have, we have too much, too much power in demonstrate, you can demonstrate and you can stop anything. We, we love demonstrations in the United States. We respect them. We see it as a visible expression of our democracy is your ability to get on the streets and block the streets. But, you know, still have to get to work. I mean, at some point in the day, you gotta do something. And, um, yeah, Hitler could have, Hitler could have done a lot of things if he wanted to. You know, he could have made Berlin into, but you know, if you have all the power, Hitler had a lot of it. If he turned into Berlin, Berlin into a colossal city, he was gonna make it like

• 1:04:50Speaker 00

  Washington, but times five. Well, Washington has already got its own issues. You know, the buildings are too big. Government buildings don't have eyes, don't have life on the street and stuff like this. Somebody like Hitler would destroy it forever, you know, because you build a monumental city that's not for people. And, um, I think that was probably one of Moses' weak points is unlike Jane Jacobs who saw people. Moses didn't see people. He saw bridges. He saw highways. He saw tunnels. He saw rivers. He saw the city is

• 1:05:31Speaker 00

  a giant traffic problem. Jane Jacobs, who was a person without portfolio most of her life, except of her own powers of judgment and persuasion. She thought, well, how does this, what, what is the shoe repairman got to do with the grocery store, got to do with the school, got to do with something else? She saw the, she saw what Moses didn't see. She saw the intricacies of the city. He saw a giant landscape. She saw the. The block, just the block.

• 1:06:07Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, there's a, there's like a common trope about socialist and communist, which is that they, that they love humanity and the abstract, but they hate people as individuals. And it's like, I guess, one way to like, describe Robert Moses. It actually kind of reminds me of a, I, I, one of my, one of my relatives is a doctor, and he's, he's not exactly a people person. And he says, like, you know, I hate, like, actually having to talk to the patients about, like, and, you know, like, ask them questions. I just like the actual detective work of, like, what is going on, looking at the charts and figuring out, doing the diagnosis. Are you optimistic about New York? Do you think that in the, continuing towards the end of the 21st century, into the

• 1:06:48Dwarkesh Patel?

  22nd century, it will still be the capital of the world? Or what do you think is the future of the city?

• 1:06:54Speaker 00

  Well, The Economist, which is a major publication that comes out of England, recently predicted that London and New York would be in 2100 what they are today, which is the capitals of the world. And London is not, is not really a major city in terms of population, probably under 10 million, much smaller than New York and way smaller than Tokyo. But London has a cosmopolitan, heterogeneous atmosphere within the rule of law. What London and New York both offer, which Shanghai doesn't, or Hong Kong doesn't at the moment, is a system so, if you

• 1:07:35Speaker 00

  disagree, you're not going to disappear. You know what I mean? It's like, there's some level of guarantee that personal safety is sacred, and you, and you can say what you want. I think that's valuable, and it's very valuable. And I think the fact that it's open to newcomers. You can't, you can't find a minority, so minority. That they don't have a presence in New York and a physical presence. I mean, if you're from Estonia, which has got fewer people than New York suburbs, I mean, individual New York suburbs, but there's an Estonian house, there's Estonian restaurants, there's, you know, India, Pakistan, every place has, has got, has got an ethnic presence. And if

• 1:08:20Speaker 00

  you want it, you can have it. You want a marriage with a larger community, marriage with it, that's fine. But if you want to celebrate your special circumstances, it's been said that New York is everybody's second home. Because you know, if you come to New York, you can find people just like yourself and, and speaking your language and eating your food and going to your, your religious institution. I think that's going to continue. And I think it what makes, not only what makes the United States unusual, there are a few other places like it. Switzerland is like it, but the thing about Switzerland is different from the United States is there are parts of Switzerland, most of it's Swiss German and parts of it's French, but they stay in their one places, you know what I

• 1:09:04Speaker 00

  mean? So they speak French here and they speak German there. You know, Arizona and Maine are not that different demographically in the United States. Everybody has shuffled the deck several times. And so I think that's what, and that's what makes New York unique. And London too. Paris a little bit. You go to the Paris Underground, you don't even know what language you're listening to. I think to be a great city in the 21st century. And by the way, that often the Texas cities are very diverse. San Francisco, LA, very diverse. It's not just New York. New York kind of stands out because it's bigger and because the neighborhoods are more distinct. Anybody can see them. I think that's, and

• 1:09:48Speaker 00

  that's what Robert Moses didn't spend any time thinking about. He wasn't concerned with who was eating at that restaurant. Wasn't important, or even if there was a restaurant, you know, whereas now.

• 1:10:01Speaker 00

  The move, the slow drift back towards cities, and I'm predicting that the pandemic will not have a permanent influence. I mean, the pandemic is huge, and it's affected the way people work and live and shop and have recreation. So I'm not trying to blow it off like something else. But I think in the long run, we are social animals. We want to be with each other. We need each other, especially if you're young and you want to be with potential romantic partners. But even other people are drawn, like just a few days ago, there was a horrible tragedy in Seoul, Korea. That's because 100,000 young people are drawn to

• 1:10:44Speaker 00

  each other. They could have had more room to swing their arms, but they wanted to crowd into this one alley because that's where other people were. They wanted to go where other people were. And that's a lot about the appeal of cities today. We've, we've been in cars and we've been on interstate highways. And at the end of the day, we're, we're almost like cats. We want to get together at night and sleep on each other or with each other. And I think that's the ultimate, it's not for everybody. Most people have maybe rather live in a small town or on the top of a mountain. But there's a percentage of

• 1:11:23Speaker 00

  people, let's call it 25%, who really want to be part of the tumble in the tide and want to be things mixed up. And they will always want to be in a place like New York. There are other places, San Francisco, Boston, you know, Philadelphia a little bit. They're not mainly in the United States, but in Europe, Copenhagen, you know, they're not, Copenhagen is not a big city. Neither is Prague, but they have urbanity. New York has urbanity. And I think we don't celebrate urbanity as much as we might. The pure joy of being with others.

• 1:11:59Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yep, yep. But I'm curious if you ever got a chance to talk to Robert Caro himself about Moses at some point?

• 1:12:08Speaker 00

  Robert Caro and I were friends. In fact, when the power broker received an award, the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians, it turned out we lived near each other in the Bronx. And I drove him home and we became friends and social friends. And

• 1:12:30Speaker 00

  I happened to be with him on the day that Robert Moses died. We were with our wives, eating out in a neighborhood called Arthur Avenue. The real little lily of New York, it's in the Bronx. It's also called Belmont. But then on the 100th anniversary of Moses's birth, I think in 1989, I was asked to give the keynote speech at a conference at Hofstra University on Moses. And Carol was also invited to be a speaker, maybe another keynote speaker. And there I said, and I still stand by this, that the power broker,

• 1:13:11Speaker 00

  I learned more from it than any book I ever read, because it's such an enormous topic. I learned more from it, and I wish I had written it myself, so that my name was on it rather than his. And I think it was the best book I ever read. That may be a slight exaggeration, but just slight. It's an incredible achievement. But having said that, I said, it's got a thousand errors. You know, just small errors. I mean, in broad strokes, it's correct. Robert Moses had more power than any urban figure in American history. He built incredible monuments that the city needs. He was ruthless and arrogant and honest.

• 1:13:56Speaker 00

  That's a big story, right there. That's probably true. But in all the little stories about the temperature in the swimming pools, about the destruction of public transit, about the destruction of the Bronx, with the Cross Bronx Expressway, about the building the bridges too low so that buses couldn't get to the beaches. He's just wrong. I mean, it's just in that way. Wasn't that way, isn't that way. And all he had to do was look at some different sources, you know that and that they were doing some of the same things in LA or Chicago. They just weren't as famous as New York. I mean, that's more or less what it was. But I think.

• 1:14:36Speaker 00

  I still feel that way. I still wish I had written the book. Wish my name was on, even with all those mistakes. I've had taught for a half a century or more New York City history at Columbia University. I've had dozens of students write term papers on one or another aspect of Carol's book. I can never remember a single one coming back and say, oh, Carol got it right. You know, they would go back to the same source and stuff like this and say, you know, this is not what, this is not the way he said it was. Now, they may be smaller, but it was generally that way. They didn't celebrate it. They, I think he'd made up his mind what he was going to argue before he started it. And Moses was a jerk. For example, he, think

• 1:15:20Speaker 00

  of the issues now with President Biden and his son Hunter, you know, and all the grief he's catching about his son or people with, you know, having, hiring.

• 1:15:35Speaker 00

  My wife is telling me not to go down this road, but, but, but Moses is attacked in the book because he's not good enough to his brother, you know. He should have done more for his brother than he did. Well, you know, so he, he didn't give his brother a job. And

• 1:15:57Speaker 00

  so I'm just saying that's all these little things that you can come to

• 1:16:04Speaker 00

  about different neighborhoods and things like that. But then I think Carol was right that Moses, the biggest builder of cities in the 20th century, the builder of the greatest city in the world, didn't like it. That's incredible. He didn't actually like the place he was designing. He wanted everybody to get out, go to, it's a better, it's better in the suburbs, better if you have a house, better if you have a garage, better if you have a car in the front. That's better than the Bronx or Brooklyn or Queens, you know what I mean? Whereas, again, his opponent, Jane Jacobs, are people now.

• 1:16:40Speaker 00

  And one of the greatest changes now than when Moses, when Carol was writing Moses, is people wanted to all have a car in New York. Everybody have a car. Teachers, when they were 16 years old, they wanted to have a driver's license more than they wanted to have sex. Get me the car. Now, a big percentage of young Americans are skipping the driver's license. They don't care as much. We're moving into a different time. And where that's going to lead us, I'm not sure. But I think we're ready to walk more for health reasons, all sorts of reasons. But Moses did not see it. Moses never drove, but he created a world for drivers.

• 1:17:19Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. So some people might object to this defense of Moses by saying, like, listen, whenever he does something well, we give him credit here. But then, whenever he does something badly, we just say, oh, well, he was just swimming with the tide of history. There were other cities that were doing it worse. So we're doing, you know, we're like doing whataboutism on the negative side of Moses' legacy. But then, we're like, happy to let him take credit for the good things. It's kind of a double standard. How would you respond to that?

• 1:17:50Speaker 00

  Well, I understand what you're saying, and I can sympathize with it. But I think most of the things, let's, let's take the Cross Bronx Expressway as an egregious example of something that Robert Carroll or his, or Moses' critics would say, God, all these people, tens of thousands of people, paid a price. Their, their lives were uprooted. But I just can't imagine you would say, we can't have a cross Bronx. I mean, you know, it could have been two blocks this way or two blocks that way. That's a different question. And we could talk about that, too. But, but I think we have to have it. And I think the parks, I think the bridges.

• 1:18:30Speaker 00

  The Verazano-Narrows Bridge transformed Staten Island. The history of Staten Island is before and after 1964. They had to take into account the curvature of the earth. That bridge was so long. At the time, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world. It's been surpassed in Europe since then, but a big bridge. That would be, that would be a lifetime's achievement. If you built the Verazano-Narrows Bridge, this gigantic, gorgeous entrance to New York Harbor, that's, that's a lifetime achievement. For Moses, it's one of a list of about 50 things. You know, you don't even think about the Verazano-Narrows Bridge and Robert Moses. It's just not, yeah, he did it. So what?

• 1:19:15Speaker 00

  He did lots of other big things, too. I think it's the scale, and the scale was not human. It was totally on a different scale. And with that comes a lot of criticism. Because as he would say himself, in order to make an omelet, you have to break eggs. No other way to do it. And he would say, I have, I had to make, I had to do, this is his answer. In order to build a great public event or thing, I have to hurt some people. That's just the way it is. And I think, and we don't want to, the way we live now, we don't want to hurt anybody.

• 1:19:57Speaker 00

  You can't, you can't run a city or a country that way. You can't. Nothing will change.

• 1:20:05Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, I've, I've had recently a lot of guests who have been advocating for this philosophical view that's called long-termism, which is basically the idea that we should take the interest of future generations and consider them equally with the interest of people alive today as a way to like emphasize, for example, that, you know, people who live like thousands of years from now, we should take their interest seriously. And one of the, I guess if we take this kind of view, that basically we just care about progeny more. You know, it's interesting. There's a part in The Power Broker where they're talking about the, you know, the cross at Bronx Expressway through East Tremont. And Moses is getting opposition from some elected official.

• 1:20:49Dwarkesh Patel?

  And Moses responds by saying, you know, you make a habit out of pointing out that I'm not democratically elected while you are. But the advantage of me not being democratically elected is that I can build projects that might not be the favorite thing for the people alive now, but will benefit the city for generations and centuries to come. There's obviously like a lot of arrogance there. And it's like, well, if that's true, right? But to the extent that that is true, and it is in many cases, right? Like all these bridges you're talking about and all these highways, they're still standing today and in wide use. It, you know, it kind of changes how you think about him. Like, given all the, given all the omelet breaking that, or the egg breaking that had to happen at the time, it's still the fact that like, we can, we can, for hundreds of

• 1:21:33Dwarkesh Patel?

  years, we'll get to use the things he built, right? So, yeah. I'm curious, how did, how did Caro, so you mentioned you were, you were with him when you found out that Moses had died. How did you react? Was he sad about it, or?

• 1:21:48Speaker 00

  Well, he was being interviewed. I just remember being stunned at the restaurant. We were eating at a restaurant in the Bronx. And they brought a telephone to him. I've never seen anybody have a telephone brought to them. You know, that was way before cell phones and everything else. It was 1989 or something like that. I don't remember the exact year, but it was somewhere like that. But we were, we were, we were, we were friends when that, when he died. Maybe it was 1981. Anyway, whatever year it was. It was after he, I criticized him in public and the New York Times quoted me. But they didn't quote that I thought was the best book I'd ever read. I wish I'd written it. They did quote that I said, it was photo mistakes. That's what the New York Times, that's what he read. He didn't hear my speech.

• 1:22:33Speaker 00

  And so, but I'm, I'm sorry. I'm, I've done that, don't have enemies with anyone, but I have regard for the book and have regard for his ability to do research. That's what's amazing about The Power Broker is his ability and interest in going back and interviewing his third grade teacher, you know, and stuff like that and finding that out. That's way more than most of us are willing to do.

• 1:22:57Dwarkesh Patel?

  But what it, what was his reaction when he found out that Moses died?

• 1:23:02Speaker 00

  You know, that was, that was not unexpected. He was ninety years old at the time. And remember, this is thirty years ago, more than that. Not many people lived to be ninety and he was a, well, he swam. He was an athlete. He was a swimmer.

• 1:23:18Speaker 00

  Swam in the ocean. In his eighties.

• 1:23:23Speaker 00

  He was quite a person.

• 1:23:24Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, there was, there's a part in the, uh, in Caro's memoir. Where he talks about learning from his, um, from, you know, Moses' former aides, who are now friends with Caro. How they would tell him that now that he had lost his power, he was just in his, um, in his, you know, in his house all day, just like looking at all his plans and writing down more ideas for there should be another highway here and so on. And, you know, just kind of like, um, impotently making new, you know, new ideas and so on. And Caro says that, uh, just like that, hearing about that scene. Um, this master builder just kind of just having nothing to do really, it made him want to cry.

• 1:24:07Dwarkesh Patel?

  And, uh, despite the fact that he was, he documented all the harm that Moses had done. So it was like a really interesting, uh, really interesting.

• 1:24:16Speaker 00

  Well, Moses had a phenomenal amount of power and he loses it all in the short order. And that's gotta be tough, really tough. Now Moses did write a response to the power broker, which was published in the New Yorker. About nineteen six seventy-five.

• 1:24:35Speaker 00

  Which is a long response, saying, of course, that Caro had it all wrong and to tell you that your listeners might want to go to, it's available, I'm sure, in the New Yorker.

• 1:24:47Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, uh, yeah, actually, I, I thought, um, I don't know what your reaction to the response was. I read it and I thought that Moses, um, at least. I thought that Moses kind of vindicated Caro's description of his personality because it was very ad hominem, it wasn't specific. I'm sure there were a lot of errors, as you say, but then Moses just says, I mean, he wrote 8,000 words, but he like actually documents very few of the supposed errors that he claims Caro is making. And the ones he does document are like minor ones, not the major ones that had to like that that were about his major public work. So it's just like small little details. But yeah, I don't know what your reaction was to that response.

• 1:25:27Speaker 00

  Well, I think you're very perceptive. I think his response was rambling, wordy, not particular. I think he probably could have taken Caro apart, but he didn't. He didn't say this page so and so, you said this, you know, this is wrong. He didn't. And he also, Moses didn't have people around him, like maybe Hitler didn't, or Trump, or somebody else, to say, boss, you're wrong here. You got to reword this. You don't mean it the way you said it.

• 1:26:00Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:26:01Speaker 00

  And also, the quality of her response was poor enough that he needed, he needed assistance. He needed a smart, or three or four smart people to say, put it this way, you gotta, or give it, go give this example, or do something else. But still, it tells you something about Moses, the response. And also, the way Moses kind of held grudges. And so he blames The New Yorker, and he blames Knopf, Alfred Knopf Publishers, because you're in cahoots with Caro, so you're all damned and going to hell, rather than just talking about Caro. So maybe that's just the way he looked at the world at his time, you know?

• 1:26:45Speaker 00

  You got to find out who's got the levers of power and then go after them. The rest of the people don't matter.

• 1:26:51Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah. Okay, so I want to be respectful of your time. You've given me so much already. But before we close out the interview, if you have any other things you want to say about the power broker, or about Moses, or about his legacy, or about, I don't know, Mimbism today, or the state of construction and public works today?

• 1:27:09Speaker 00

  Well, I think of Moses as the polar opposite of Jane Jacobs. Jane Jacobs was a woman, but think about what Jane Jacobs saw as important. She saw the block, the store, the people, the mixture of genders and races and everything else as being significant. Robert Moses really didn't see, as you said earlier, people. He saw massive things, you know, things you'd put on an architectural board, you know, and he didn't see other things. So that's both his strength and his weakness. Had he seen people more, maybe he would never have built what he did,

• 1:27:52Speaker 00

  and we wouldn't have had the bridges. You know, but we do. And can you imagine New York without the Triborough Bridge? I mean, it's not imaginable. You know, you've got to have it. Because what, again, readers who have not been to New York may not understand, this is a city that has water all through it. You know, it's about water. It's not like Dallas, where there's essentially no water. You know what I mean? New York water is everywhere. You've got to cross these bridges. You've got to get over there. So it creates a problem of circulation that's vast, especially when you have tens of millions of people trying to move around. So that's something that Moses figured a way around.

• 1:28:37Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yep, yep. Actually, one more question that just occurs to me. It's just that I'm curious why you think that this biography of Moses by Caro achieved the cultural prominence it did. Of course, it's like an incredible book, and I incredibly enjoyed it a lot as well. But like, there's countless biographies written every year, right? And many of them are also good. What was it about this book that catapulted it? I mean, there was a review of the new play about Robert Moses, and the title of that review was just that, "New Yorkers Love to Hate Robert Moses." Why does he have this sort of cultural prominence in New York, and actually, like, just across the world?

• 1:29:20Speaker 00

  Well, because I think Robert Moses represented a past that's, you know, a time when we wanted to build bridges and super highways and things that pretty much has gone out of, we're not building super highways now. We're not building vast bridges like Moses built all the time.

• 1:29:37Speaker 00

  So it's, we're, he's not swimming with the tide of history anymore. And so I think that's part of it. Plus the fact that it's a, it's a biography that has a, has an argument, and the argument's understandable, and it runs through the whole book. And he's in a, he's a terrific writer, and builds suspense, and he can write a paragraph in two words, and he repeats himself a little too much. And anyway, when I get negative, my wife is nearby getting on me. But anyway, I think it's a terrific book. Look, Moses was a great man. Carol is a, is a great writer, and in many ways a great historian. And I think the other

• 1:30:18Speaker 00

  thing is, Carol's book is so important. You know, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, I have lots of books written about him. Carol, not so much. I mean, Moses is not so much. He's not that famous. So it was, it's such a big and intimidating book. Everybody else is afraid to go there. There will be other books about Robert Moses. There may be underway as we speak. And they will revise our reinterpretation. I think that's true. He will be reinterpreted in ways in which we talked about today, though I don't know that. But, you know, the, the basic, the basic thing that Moses, that Moses did is, was there. You can look at it. And

• 1:31:00Speaker 00

  the things that Carol said about him are mostly true. I mean, where he lived is, you know, he gives a little tiny bit about an affair that, he wants to explain to me that sex was not important to Moses. You know, that you want to understand him, it wasn't about, wasn't about females. And I think that he cared about, Moses was committed, married to his job and to his vision of a city. And that's both his greatness and the fact that he didn't have friends or many friends, and he didn't live the world the way most people live it, you know, with people. I think that's probably all I know.

• 1:31:45Dwarkesh Patel?

  Well, this is a true pleasure. I highly recommend that people check out your book, Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York. And there they can find your essay on, you know, Robert Moses and the Rise of New York City, which I highly recommend. Professor Jackson, where else can people find you?

• 1:32:05Speaker 00

  My email address is still at Columbia University, K T J, just my initials, one, number one, at Columbia.edu. I'm there. Okay, always a pleasure.

• 1:32:18Dwarkesh Patel?

  Hey, thanks for listening. If you enjoyed that episode, I would really, really, really appreciate it if you could share it. This is still a pretty small podcast, so it is a huge help when any one of you shares an episode that you like. Post it on Twitter, send it to friends who you think might like it, put it in your group chats, just let the word go forth. It helps out a ton. Many thanks to my amazing editor, Graham Besalu, for producing this podcast, and to Mia Ayana for creating the amazing transcripts that accompany each episode, which have helpful links, and you can find them at the link in the description below. Remember to subscribe

• 1:33:01Dwarkesh Patel?

  on YouTube and your favorite podcast platforms. Cheers. See you next time.