To the men of the machine, the end of the La Guardia administration, cleanest in the city’s history, meant only one thing: the twelve lean years were over. Now was the time for the fat. E finita la cuccagna! the Little Flower had promised—and he had kept his promise. But now he was gone. The party was on again.

New York was the city of the Fix, of “protection,” of the shakedown. The twelve years of La Guardia had been only an interlude. New York was again what it had been before the Little Flower bounced into City Hall: a city in which everything had its price.

The safeguards included in all previous New York State legislation on authorities to limit their lifespan were the provisions setting a time limit on their bonds, a date by which each authority must redeem all its bonds, surrender control of all its facilities and go out of existence. Moses, drafting amendments to the Triborough Bridge Authority Ac

And it was on those highways and bridges—the creations of a single individual, public works sprung from that individual’s private creative vision, financed and approved as a result of his unique political genius, driven to completion by his savage drive and unswerving will—that the effect of that single individual’s policies on the 12,000,000 indiv

After twenty-five years, he was still poor—the Governor’s salary in 1928 was only $10,000, less than that of his cabinet officers—and he was tired of that, too; he wanted security in his old age and something to leave his sons.

In politics, power vacuums are always filled. And the power vacuum in parks was filled by Robert Moses.

The lack of new interborough bridges and tunnels wasn’t due to a lack of ideas; New York was littered with evidence to prove that there had been plenty of those. But the evidence also proved how difficult it was, in New York, for ideas to become reality.

debouched

After taking over the Authority, Moses took almost no time to find out why the Manhattan terminus had been placed at 125th Street: William Randolph Hearst had owned deteriorating real estate there and he had wanted the city to buy it. And it took Moses little time to learn why the bridge was supposed to be bedecked with costly granite: the quarries