ROBERT MOSES was born on December 18, 1888. He was not given a middle name—because his mother saw no reason for one. Bella Moses was a strong-willed woman, so strong-willed, in fact, that some of her relatives said she was too much like her mother—and not enough like her father. Bella’s parents, Robert’s grandparents, were first cousins.

The problem of constructing large-scale public works in a crowded urban setting, where such works impinge on the lives of or displace thousands of voters, is one which democracy has not yet solved.

He had built more housing than any public official in history, but the city was starved for housing, more starved, if possible, than when he had started building, and the people who lived in that housing hated it—hated it, James Baldwin could write, “almost as much as the policemen, and this is saying a great deal.” He had built great monuments and

When he built housing for poor people, he built housing bleak, sterile, cheap—expressive of patronizing condescension in every line. And he built it in locations that contributed to the ghettoization of the city, dividing up the city by color and income. And by skewing city expenditures toward revenue-producing services, he prevented the city from

The dispossessed, barred from many areas of the city by their color and their poverty, had no place to go but into the already overcrowded slums—or into “soft” borderline areas that then became slums, so that his “slum clearance programs” created new slums as fast as they were clearing the old.

For highways, Moses dispossessed 250,000 persons. For his other projects—Lincoln Center, the United Nations, the Fordham, Pratt and Long Island University campuses, a dozen mammoth urban renewal projects—he dispossessed tens of thousands more; there are available no accurate figures on the total number of people evicted from their homes for all

To build his highways, Moses threw out of their homes 250,000 persons—more people than lived in Albany or Chattanooga, or in Spokane, Tacoma, Duluth, Akron, Baton Rouge, Mobile, Nashville or Sacramento.

Corruption before Moses had been unorganized, based on a multitude of selfish, private ends. Moses’ genius for organizing it and focusing it at a central source gave it a new force, a force so powerful that it bent the entire city government off the democratic bias. He had used the power of money to undermine the democratic processes of the largest

Prudent, efficient, economical? So incredibly wasteful was Moses of the money he tolled from the public in quarters and dimes that on a single bridge alone he paid $40,000,000 more in interest than he had to. Authority projects cost the taxpayers nothing? Covert “loans” made to authorities by the state—loans designed never to be repaid—ran into the