Robert Moses and His Lasting Legacy

The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s book about New York City’s master builder, Robert Moses, turned 50 in 2024. Caro’s compelling tale of untrammeled, corrupted power wielded by one man over decades seems as vivid to the young today as it was to me when I was a teenager reading excerpts in The New Yorker. Naturally, Moses objected vehemently to Caro’s characterization of his career. So did others. In time, a revisionist point of view developed, including, in 2007, a book of essays—Robert Moses and the Modern City, edited by Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson—that was more sympathetic to Moses’s objectives and methods. Jackson writes in his introduction:

[Moses] made possible New York’s ability to remain in the front rank of world cities into the twenty-first century. Had Moses never lived, America’s greatest city might have deteriorated beyond the capabilities of anyone to return it to prosperity. As it is, the power broker built the infrastructure that secured New York’s place among the greatest cities in the history of the world.

The debate over Moses’s legacy continues. Caro’s defenders point to Jane Jacobs, whose The Death and Life of Great American Cities criticized Moses’s large-scale slum clearance and urban-renewal efforts, celebrating instead the organic vibrancy of dense, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods. Today’s planners largely embrace Jacobs’s ideals: lively streetscapes, transit access, and incremental growth driven by private actors, with government as facilitator—not builder—of grand visions.

The revisionists aren’t exactly Moses fans. They acknowledge that some of his methods—particularly urban renewal and neighborhood-destroying highway construction—became untenable in New York, as in other cities. But they find themselves unavoidably in awe of what he achieved and, like Jackson, dubious that mayors and governors could have done as much without his involvement. They further note that the Jacobs-inspired urbanist ideal turns out to be a place of glaring inequality, in which revived amenities attract the affluent back to the inner city. Many of Moses’s redevelopment projects did displace low-income families from areas thought to have untapped real-estate value; but even absent urban renewal, the private market proved quite capable of displacing the poor on its own. Moses did include low-income public and publicly assisted housing in some of his urban-renewal initiatives, but never enough to relocate all the uprooted households. The problem of making New York City a place of equal opportunity for all households continues to vex city planners and animate public debate.

I worked as a city planner for 38 years in New York, starting out a dozen years after Moses’s final fall from power in 1968. I never met Moses—he died in 1981—but his shadow was ever-present. As much as New York City planners want to live in Jacobs’s world, they plan around Moses’s physical legacy.

That legacy remains almost entirely intact 56 years after his departure from public life. It is astonishingly broad, and much of it—the parks, beaches, housing developments, Lincoln Center, the United Nations headquarters—is highly valued by the public. But Moses’s highways represent his most contentious achievements. The city’s and region’s economy remain dependent on the arterial highway network put in place in the relatively brief period when the public viewed highway-building as a path to a glorious future of personal mobility.

New York City’s great planning challenge is its geography. Three densely populated major islands (Manhattan, Long, and Staten) and a narrow peninsula, the Bronx, are separated from the mainland United States (New York’s Westchester County and northern New Jersey) by rivers, straits, and harbors. Building the transportation linkages between the city, suburban Long Island, and the mainland required massive development projects. Many predate Moses’s time in power: the construction of four East River bridges (Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg, and Queensborough) and multiple Harlem River bridges; the Pennsylvania Railroad’s New York Improvement (including Penn Station, the North and East River Tunnels, the Hell Gate Bridge, and more); the construction of Grand Central Terminal by the New York Central railroad; and the completion of most of the present-day subway system.

One improvement that did not take place was the Port Authority’s construction of a freight rail tunnel between New York City and New Jersey. As Jameson Doig writes in his 2001 history, Empire on the Hudson, the Port Authority and the railroads serving the New Jersey waterfront were unable to agree on terms that would permit the bond financing of a new freight tunnel. New York thus remained largely dependent for freight delivery on a vast network of railcar float barges traversing the waterways between New Jersey and the city. Overland freight rail came only from the north, with rail bridges crossing the Hudson River in upstate towns Poughkeepsie and Selkirk.

Highways represented a consolation prize. Thwarted in its rail-tunnel plans, the Port Authority turned to building interstate bridges and tunnels, completing three bridges to Staten Island (Outerbridge, Goethals, and Bayonne), the Lincoln Tunnel, and the George Washington Bridge in the prewar years. It also assumed operation of the Holland Tunnel. Yet, while the city built the elevated Miller Highway in the early 1930s along the West Side of Manhattan south of 72nd Street, it was generally unprepared for the advent of the automotive era.

This posed a major political problem. Drivers, newly empowered, demanded mobility. Bridges, tunnels, and highways across the city had to be designed, financed, and built. Enter Moses, who saw the potential of public-authority bond financing, backed by tolls, pioneered by the Port Authority for interstate crossings. Toll roads could solve the problem of intra-city linkages, beginning with the Triborough (now Robert F. Kennedy) Bridge in the 1930s.

After World War II, Moses became both an instigator of a driving-friendly policy regime and a seeming problem-solver. The national freight system transitioned to interstate trucking postwar, and the federal government offered generous subsidies for suburban housing construction. This regime unleashed torrents of federal funding for an interstate highway system connecting and cutting through cities. Moses combined state and federal funds with bond revenues backed by tolls from the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (TBTA), an entity that he controlled, giving him immense resources.

Had Moses remained an obscure municipal reformer, rising car ownership and the demands of truck-dependent freight users would have led New York City and State to build highways anyway. Keep in mind that Moses often lost political battles and that the road system he devised was limited in extent—particularly compared with those created in other American cities. For better or worse, his chief legacy remains the city’s network of roads and the land-use patterns that developed around them.

Even Moses’s revisionist defenders should be glad that some of his highway projects failed. Manhattan has only peripheral highways, most of which forbid trucks (plus the short stretch of Interstate 95 in Washington Heights, connecting the George Washington and Alexander Hamilton Bridges). The completion of I-95, including the George Washington Bridge’s double-decking by the Port Authority and the establishment of connecting highways in New Jersey, ended most railcar float operations and made interstate trucking the primary mode of delivering freight into the city. But things could have been different. Moses failed to secure approval for the Mid-Manhattan and Lower Manhattan Expressways, both appearing in the “Yellow Book” proposed Interstate Highway System maps from 1955. (See “Scars on the Cities,” Autumn 2021.)

No commentator today regrets that these highways were never built. The Mid-Manhattan Expressway would have taken a wide swath along East and West 30th Streets to connect the Queens-Midtown and Lincoln Tunnels. Telltale indications of those plans exist in street widenings around the Kips Bay Towers residential development along Second Avenue and East 30th Street and on West 30th Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. Vibrant, dense neighborhoods in between would have been replaced by a congested expressway, parking lots, and gas stations. Imagine the Cross Bronx Expressway viaduct through the Bathgate neighborhood but in midtown: an urban nightmare.

Building the Lower Manhattan Expressway and the extensions of I-78 in Brooklyn and Queens would have obliterated parts of Soho, the Lower East Side, Williamsburg, Bushwick, East New York, and Jamaica. The untold potential damage to multiple neighborhoods helps explain why the I-78 highway plan was never implemented in New York. But not putting expressways through midtown and lower Manhattan came with consequences, good and bad.

One is that Manhattan was never remade for the automobile, despite the wishes of Moses, elected officials, and the era’s City Planning Commission. The city’s comprehensively revised 1961 zoning resolution required off-street parking equivalent to 40 percent of units in larger new residential buildings, and many of these facilities became commuter garages. (See “Zoning That Works,” Special Issue 2021.) That requirement was removed in 1982, however, and today, Manhattan commuter parking is relatively scarce and expensive. Of the peripheral public parking garages that Moses built to accommodate car commuters, only the Battery Parking Garage in lower Manhattan remains. Most persons traveling to the business core south of 60th Street use public transit.

On the other hand, enormous traffic loads got channeled onto the limited highway network that did get built. Manhattan’s truck routes, coming off the Harlem and East River bridges, must use local streets in densely populated residential neighborhoods. The outcome won by the highway opponents is better than the alternative, but serving an affluent population in a crowded city still requires managing conflicts. Though transportation planners often advocate congestion pricing as the best way to limit vehicular congestion, a political consensus in favor of this option remains elusive.

Outside Manhattan, Moses had greater influence in orienting residents to car-based living. The Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens experienced two major growth spurts after the 1898 consolidation of the five boroughs. The first came with the subway system’s establishment—initially through private operating companies, then the city-operated Independent Subway System (IND), with the system consolidated in 1940. By then, nearly all of Manhattan was within a 15-minute walk of a subway station. Similar coverage reached only parts of three other boroughs, where car ownership was low, and transit use remained high.

Automobiles steadily gained importance in the outer boroughs. By 1941, Moses had built the Belt Parkway around Brooklyn and Queens, connecting to the Cross Island Parkway, Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, and Hutchinson River Parkway in the Bronx. Meantime, the IND’s proposed “Second System” expansion, which would have extended walkable subway-station coverage to much of the outer boroughs, was never completed (and largely remains so). Zoning was broadly permissive, and expanded subway access would likely have spurred denser housing and reduced car dependency. Instead, with highways but few subways, the outer boroughs’ second growth spurt resulted in small homes filling outlying areas.

“I wish that Robert Moses had been in charge of the subways instead of the highways,” Jackson observes. The tolls that his roads generated could indeed have been used to complete the IND Second System. But politicians wanted more bridges and highways to fulfill the public’s dream of unlimited mobility. Even in areas that the subway served, developers were forced to set aside space for parking. The assumption that residents wanted to move around by car was, of course, self-fulfilling. The city, in fact, made major subway improvements after the war, uniting the IND system with the older BMT built to compatible standards. But the Second Avenue trunk line in Manhattan, as well as subway extensions to the city’s edges, remained unbuilt.

The imbalance between the resources devoted to roads and those spent on transit expansion culminated in 1964, with Moses’s completion of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. Running between Brooklyn and Staten Island, that structure features 12 car lanes and no rail transit. The bridge opened the city’s last largely undeveloped borough to car-oriented growth.

When the TBTA finally merged into the new Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) in 1968, New Yorkers were promised the Program for Action—a revised version of the IND Second System that would provide many of its benefits. As Philip Mark Plotch describes in The Last Subway, the Program for Action was a political ploy that elected officials could not finance or deliver. Little was built; the portions that were did not reach the city’s low-density edges.

The outlying boroughs’ low-density, auto-intensive land use has vexed city planners since Moses’s day. The 1961 zoning resolution entailed a vast reduction in housing density. In districts covering much of the outer boroughs, the city made new apartment buildings nearly impossible to erect. Post-1961 changes rendered zoning even more restrictive, explicitly limiting large areas to single- or two-family homes. Moses’s circumferential highways, new Staten Island expressways, and connecting roads increasingly meant that residents needed a car in order to shop or to get to work.

As population growth rebounded in the 1980s, the city initiated changes that undid some of the 1961 restrictions. For a few decades, zoning changes that facilitated new housing were limited to subway-served areas, where cars are less common. That strategy became politically unsustainable, though, as it appeared to protect mostly white, affluent, low-density neighborhoods from growth at the expense of older, less affluent, often minority neighborhoods. Planners have sought ways to spread growth more equitably, but current mayor Eric Adams’s latest proposals were scaled back by the city council. Millions of city residents will continue viewing car ownership as a necessity.

That Moses’s plans for a fully integrated highway system never came to fruition spelled doom for the city’s manufacturing economy. At its early 1950s peak, New York City manufacturing was concentrated in multistory loft buildings oriented to railcar float terminals on the waterfront and freight-rail connections to the north. Single-story manufacturing buildings trended after the war, but they used far more land than the legacy loft buildings. Midcentury planners proposed new industrial-zoning districts (prohibiting residences) to allow manufacturing to move to modern buildings. According to Zoning New York City, the city’s 1958 planning report supporting what became the 1961 zoning resolution: “The 17,600 acres proposed [for industrially zoned land] provide almost 6,000 acres for industrial expansion over the 11,800 acres in industrial use in 1956.”

These expanded industrial areas sprawled too far for the existing rail- and barge-based transportation system to serve. Only Moses’s full proposed postwar expressway system—and widespread urban renewal, in order to remove older buildings and assemble larger lots in places like Williamsburg and Long Island City—would suffice.

For the city to retain a modern manufacturing sector was always a long shot, dependent on an elite planning technocracy running roughshod over community residents. That was exactly what Moses offered and what mayors and governors wanted—until the Jacobs-inspired backlash made it impossible. By the 1980s, activists had defeated many proposed highways and persuaded a reluctant City Planning Commission to recognize residences in several areas designated for industry. Ultimately, many were rezoned to permit housing. New Yorkers who live, work, and dine in formerly industrial areas like Soho, Tribeca, West Chelsea, Williamsburg, and Long Island City can be grateful that planners’ vision—new industrial parks replacing broad residential areas—failed.

But many who admire Jacobs and vilify Moses also disparage the service economy that supplanted manufacturing as the city’s economy rebounded through the 1970s and 1980s. Activists and elected officials still dream of a manufacturing revival; as recently as 2023, the city council passed a local law requiring the city to produce an “industrial development strategic plan” by the end of 2025 and every eight years thereafter. That same council made a political deal with Mayor Eric Adams to give itself discretionary review of new online retail-distribution facilities. Such facilities are one of the few successful types of industrial activity in the city, but the council likely aims to condition their approval on union representation. The likely result: these facilities would be placed outside the city, where large tractor-trailer loads would be broken into individual packages for delivery by smaller vehicles—raising delivery costs for residents and putting more stress on the limited interstate highway network that Moses managed to build.

Industrial revival is a perpetual pipe dream. It has stymied residential rezoning in many of the city’s remaining manufacturing-zoned areas. In a dense urban environment that nobody wants to remake, this attitude leaves industrially zoned land in an unproductive state. Much of Gotham’s industrial land would be far more valuable if used for housing.

Discrediting Moses’s methods foreclosed industry as a significant component of the city’s economy, but this was a trade-off worth making. Older U.S. cities that were far more successful in building highways fared little better in retaining manufacturing jobs. Regardless, the farsighted rail transit system, laid down mostly in the pre-Moses era, still has much more capacity than the city’s current population requires. It could support even more residents if a version of the Program for Action were ever completed.

New York City officials now shun the medicalized language that Moses once used to describe older working-class housing. They no longer refer to urban blight as a “cancer” that needs to be excised. The city no longer targets its remaining nineteenth-century tenements for “slum clearance”; restrictive zoning, historic districts, and rent regulation protect these buildings from redevelopment. From time to time, private developers manage to demolish one or two tenements and put up a new tower in their stead, but neither public officials nor residents expect to replace these ancient walkup buildings or their tiny, poorly ventilated apartments with anything better.

Legal and procedural constraints now ensure that nobody will ever again wield the power that Moses once had to remake neighborhoods. These constitute yet another planning legacy, extending well beyond new regulatory tools like historic preservation. Process changes, from environmental review to the multilevel Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP), dramatically slow approvals and add many veto points along the way. Moses never had to worry about these strictures.

“Legal and procedural constraints now ensure that nobody will ever again wield the power that Moses once had to remake neighborhoods.”

Process determines policy. Moses famously steamrolled community opposition to his projects. One of Caro’s most moving chapters describes futile efforts by local activists in 1953 to reroute the Cross Bronx Expressway around the densely populated East Tremont neighborhood. Then at the height of his powers, Moses would not be thwarted. Samuel Zipp’s book Manhattan Projects describes another Moses victory: the Lincoln Square Urban Renewal Plan. Mobilizing elite cultural support, he secured approval to displace more than 7,000 families and 800 businesses. The political costs of the Lincoln Square projects, however, were too great for Mayor Robert F. Wagner Sr., who removed Moses as the city’s urban-renewal czar.

Political advocacy crested over time. A veteran community activist once suggested at an event I attended that the advent of television was key in Moses’s downfall: on TV, the aging Moses came across as an arrogant bully from another era. Mayor John Lindsay responded to burgeoning activism by establishing community boards as informal local voices in the 1960s; the city charter formally incorporated the 59 boards in 1975. Meantime, Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), requiring environmental review for federal projects, and the New York State Legislature enacted parallel state procedures that applied to local zoning changes and state- or city-funded public projects.

All these reforms dramatically changed the roles of state and local government in physical planning. Since the 1980s, New York City has not built a new limited-access highway. Environmental litigation halted the Westway interstate highway on the West Side of Manhattan in the 1980s. Facing a potential loss of federal funding, city and state officials decided instead to construct a street-level boulevard. Anytime the state and city departments of transportation seek to reconstruct and modernize Moses’s highways, whether to remove bottlenecks or to make roads safer, they tailor such efforts around regulations to avoid writing lengthy Environmental Impact Statements.

Two ambitious figures in New York city planning have since evoked comparisons with Moses. One was Edward Logue, whom Governor Nelson Rockefeller made head of his new housing superagency, the Urban Development Corporation (UDC), in the late 1960s. Rockefeller secured state legislation allowing the UDC to override local zoning, a Moses-like solution to community resistance. But operating in a far more constrained political and regulatory environment, Logue used those powers differently. Rather than furthering the political objectives of his sponsor, Logue set out to challenge suburban voters’ deeply embedded preferences. His biographer, Lizabeth Cohen, quotes a colleague describing Logue as “Robert Moses and the anti–Robert Moses all at once. He would think as large as Moses and had no less ability to implement. . . . But unlike Moses, he was as committed to social transformation as he was to physical building.”

Logue’s most successful project, Roosevelt Island, sustained for decades as a socioeconomically diverse enclave, reflects this commitment to social transformation. His equally socially conscious, yet notably unsuccessful, push in the early 1970s to create low-income housing in New York City suburbs ultimately caused the legislature to revoke UDC’s zoning-override powers.

The second figure was Dan Doctoroff. In the early 2000s, the ambitious development plans of Michael Bloomberg’s mayoral administration led the media to compare Doctoroff, the deputy mayor spearheading rebuilding projects, with Moses. A 2023 New York Times article wrote of Doctoroff: “Once, and it wasn’t so long ago, Dan Doctoroff had more power to decide what got built in New York City than anyone since Robert Moses.” That wasn’t true. By Bloomberg’s mayoralty, New York City was hemmed in by environmental laws and city charter changes making Moses-style maneuvering impossible. Doctoroff steered development proposals through these complex procedures, achieving a democratic consensus that makes his achievements even more impressive. One major win was the Hudson Yards rezoning around the Javits Center on Manhattan’s West Side, including a city-funded extension of the crosstown Number 7 subway from Times Square to 34th Street and 11th Avenue. This effectively substituted for the Program for Action’s proposed crosstown line on 48th Street.

The Bloomberg-Doctoroff team lost battles, too. In 2005, the state Public Authority Control Board (PACB) vetoed a proposal to put up on the West Side of Manhattan a stadium for the city’s 2012 Summer Olympics bid, which would later be converted to a football stadium for the New York Jets and adjunct facility for the Javits Convention Center. The PACB exposes public authority projects to veto by the state assembly speaker and state senate majority leader. That hurdle did not exist in Moses’s day.

In 2008, a Bloomberg-era plan to institute congestion pricing in the Manhattan core died amid opposition among the state assembly’s Democratic majority. Moses was certainly familiar with the need to keep the state legislature on board with his schemes, but today’s participatory politics defeat anyone’s dreams of power-brokering away from public scrutiny.

The Bloomberg-Doctoroff congestion-pricing idea was yet another attempt to create a funding stream to advance the MTA’s Program for Action, or at least part of it. In the following decade, Governor Andrew Cuomo secured funding to complete the first phase of the Second Avenue Subway (SAS), the program’s centerpiece. As Plotch recounts in The Last Subway, that came at the expense of ongoing maintenance of the rest of the system. Late in Cuomo’s tenure, the legislature finally approved a congestion pricing plan to supply funding for the SAS second phase, among other improvements. Governor Kathy Hochul suspended that plan in 2024 but sought to revive it shortly after the presidential election.

Regardless of congestion pricing’s future, Moses’s ghost might share a lesson with his struggling twenty-first-century successors: drivers have the political clout in New York. As much as city planners might dream otherwise, transit riders do not.

Today’s New Yorkers live in a substantially improved version of the city that Moses built. Many of the issues he cared about, however, as well as others he ignored, are still unresolved. Standing much as he left them are the highways, bridges, and tunnels. Plagued by chronic congestion, though much safer than they once were, are the roads. And largely unchanged is the transit system, notwithstanding small segments of the Program for Action and the Bloomberg administration’s subway extension to Hudson Yards. The city’s road congestion won’t improve unless road access gets properly priced and public transit is expanded and elevated to global standards. Road pricing has yet to prove politically viable, but transit improvements depend on it.

Looming as an obstacle to such reforms is an important aspect of today’s New York with which Moses did not have to contend: the political dominance of public-employee unions. Today, in a far wealthier city than the one that Moses lived in, public financial resources get diverted to sustain low-productivity labor practices and generous benefits. Moses controlled the TBTA’s toll revenues for decades and used them to back bonds for new bridges, tunnels, and highways; the post-merger MTA, beset by high labor costs, needs not only those tolls but ever-increasing tax revenue to maintain its system in an acceptable state of repair. As long as these unions remain dominant, it’s not realistic to expect the transit-capacity improvements needed for the city to grow and remake itself in the environmentally sustainable way that planners advocate.

In some respects, Moses’s legacy has improved with time. Even people who strongly dislike him often concede that his parks legacy is glorious. Moses opened large areas of the waterfront for public use but left the industrial areas and railcar float terminals alone. Since his day, the city has opened new parks in many of those locations along the Hudson, East, and Harlem Rivers, as well as New York Bay.

Though New York no longer undertakes urban-renewal and large-scale clearance projects, it remains heavily involved in regulating and subsidizing housing—just as in Moses’s time. Moses worked in an economically declining city, where older tenement housing was seen as naturally affordable but substandard. Planners wanted to leverage federal, state, and local housing funds to give even low-income households access to good housing. No such optimism exists today. Politicians and planners talk far more than Moses did about housing equity, but they are scarcely closer to achieving it.

City planners have advanced past the thinking of Moses’s era, yes. But they have continually returned to his lessons. Has Moses’s infrastructure “secured New York’s place among the greatest cities in the history of the world,” as Jackson wrote? Or did it only stave off decline? As New York stagnates in the 2020s, falling behind more innovative, better-managed world cities, one wonders whether a new era of profound change to its physical fabric is even possible.

Top Photo: Traffic on the Cross Bronx Expressway, circa 1965 (Grant White/FPG/Archive Photos/Getty Images)