And the Chase Manhattan Bank was selected by Moses as the trustee of Triborough’s bonds and hence was the single largest recipient of the lucrative service fees connected with them.

Moses built public works costing, in 1968 dollars, twenty-seven billion dollars. In terms of personal conception and completion, no other public official in the history of the United States built public works costing an amount even close to that figure. In those terms, Robert Moses was unquestionably America’s most prolific physical creator. He was

A borough president, searching desperately for a means of obtaining large-scale public works for his borough, could find only one way: to cooperate with Moses. He had no choice in the matter. Supposedly the servant of these elected representatives of the sovereign people of the city, Robert Moses was in reality their master.

In this 339-page book on the life of Robert Moses, there is not the faintest hint that he had a brother and sister.

The resignation ultimatum, perfected by Moses during the Roosevelt Governorship, was a heavily utilized weapon in his running battle with the Mayor, a weapon used to win even small points: “I must insist that…approval of filling the position be granted forthwith. Otherwise I cannot assume further responsibility for this work.” The ultimatum might

Had his arrogance been merely intellectual, he could have disciplined himself—this man with a will strong enough to discipline himself to a life of unending toil—for the few weeks necessary to give him a chance at the Governorship. But his arrogance was emotional, visceral, a driving force created by heredity and hardened by living, a force too

Spending the money from the subway fare on highways would compound the inequities already existing in the city’s transportation setup. It was neither fair nor just.

No weapon the city possessed—not executive, legislative or judicial—had been powerful enough to stand off Moses’ attacks on one of its most beloved institutions. The Aquarium fight only reinforced the conclusion to which some of the most perceptive reformers had come after the Crossing fight: that, in Moses’ chosen spheres of activity, the city no

The physical works of Robert Moses are not confined to New York and its suburbs. The largest of them are hundreds of miles from the city, stretched along the Niagara Frontier and—in distant reaches of New York State known to natives as “the North Country,” north even of Massena, a town where frost comes in August and the temperature can be thirty