The Power Broker

When there is no time for the thinking required for original creation, the tendency is to repeat what has proven successful in the past. Many of Moses’ New York projects (not all; those in which he was particularly interested—and on which he spent substantial time—would be magnificent additions to the civic estate) began to reveal a conscious effor

Moses submitted the designs for his structures—on the very day that their construction was beginning, so that by the time the commission got around to considering them, they were finished.)

As for the vilification that he spewed over his opponent and everyone connected with him—former friends as well as enemies—it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the explanation for this, too, lay in character rather than campaign tactics. Since his earliest days in power, Moses had tried not just to defeat but to destroy anyone who stood in

Roosevelt’s successor as Governor, Herbert H. Lehman, deeply respected Moses. Says one man who served as an adviser to both: “Roosevelt saw Jones Beach in terms both of people swimming and in terms of the political gains that could come from those people swimming. Herbert Lehman thought only of helping people to go swimming and be happy. And he fel

Central Park, most famous and beautiful of the city’s open spaces, “the most noble, the most praiseworthy, the most philanthropic of all our public works,” according to an 1876 New York Herald editorial, had been the creation of Calvert Vaux and the genius of urban landscape, Frederick Law Olmsted, who, in 1857—with Olmsted still an unknown young p

The number of visits to the Long Island state parks approximated 3,000,000 in 1930; the total number of visits to all national parks in the United States in that year was 3,400,000.

The structure might appear flimsy but it was shored up with buttresses of the strongest material available in the world of politics: public opinion. A Governor—even a Governor who hated the man who dwelt within that structure—would pull it down at his own peril.

Men who worked for him had the satisfaction not only of seeing their plans turned into steel and concrete, but also of seeing the transformation take place so rapidly that the fulfillment was all the more satisfying. Moses’ men feared him, but they also admired and respected him—many of them seemed to love him.

If a man wasn’t making what Moses thought he should be, he would put the man’s wife on the payroll in some job that required no work—such as answering the telephone in their home—and pay her an additional stipend.