It is a fact that the Third Avenue Transit Company secretly told Moses it was very anxious not to have the terminal condemned, for its location was strategic for its buses. And it is also a fact that for twenty years it was considered an open secret in Bronx political circles that key borough politicians held large but carefully hidden interests in

In attempting to enlist the support of other sections in the fight her own was making, she ran into the selfishness that Tallamy knew was one of Moses’ greatest assets in New York (and that Moses of course fostered by releasing details of his projects only one section at a time).

The construction of parkways—like the construction of conventional highways—was a potential source of great wealth to politicians. Parkways meant construction contracts. Politicians who had a say in which firms received those contracts could expect financial remembrances from a successful firm, if indeed they—or a relative or a trusted associate kn

But Moses’ personality made him particularly susceptible to the addiction of power. And now he had been a mainliner for years. And while he had always before sought power only for the sake of his dreams, now, for the first time, he began to seek power for power’s own sake, as an end in and for itself.

Things were different in the city. The crucial factor in the building of public works on Long Island was space, vast, endless tracts of uncluttered openness; in the city the crucial factor was lack of space and the fact that space was not merely filled but filled with people, people with their endlessly intertwined, hopelessly snarled tangles of as

Perhaps consideration should be given to trying to ease Long Island’s traffic problem by other means, specifically the improved mass transit that the Regional Plan Association and other reformer-backed groups had been proposing for a decade.

“Once you sink that first stake,” he would often say, “they’ll never make you pull it up.”

The Governor wanted the bridge built, he came to understand, but he would not let Moses build it; it might, considering the public and private promises, be too raw to assign the direction of the huge task to anyone else, so he would simply wait to get the five-year job started until Moses, aging, was no longer able to embark on it. It gradually bec

Tuesday, April 24, 1956, the day that Robert Moses sent his troops into Central Park, was Robert Moses’ Black Tuesday. For on it, he lost his most cherished asset: his reputation. The Moses Boom had lasted for thirty years. Now it was over.