Sublime

After Charles Murphy’s death, Tammany had returned to its old ways of doing business, and corruption was rampant in New York City. But Roosevelt relied on the votes of Tammany Democrats in the legislature to enact his program, and he was reluctant to call the organization to task.

New York was a city divided by water, split by rivers and bays. Every modern water crossing within the city’s borders, not only those above the water but those beneath it, not only every bridge but every tunnel constructed within the city’s borders for the use of motor vehicles since 1909, was now under the control of authorities that he controlled

And to the amazement of reporters who had smiled skeptically at the time, La Guardia kept his promise, slashing thousands of nonessential jobs from city payrolls, slashing the salaries of the employees who remained, balancing the city’s budget—and raising the moral tone of government in New York to new heights.

The explanation for Moses’ independence of La Guardia was as complex as the Little Flower’s many-petaled character and as simple—and ineluctable—as the basic realities of the political game at which the Mayor excelled.

Then he obtained hundreds more by diverting CWA-paid laborers on other Park Department projects to the Triborough project without CWA permission. (It always took a few days for CWA officials to find out what their laborers were doing, and by then Moses could tell them that since the work had been started, it would be silly not to allow it to be com

But, buried within the lines of convoluted legalisms, the amendment also contained an innocuous phrase—concealed, as was the custom of the man who had been the best bill drafter in Albany, at the end of a long sentence whose other clauses all purportedly limited his powers—allowing the Coordinator to “represent the city in its relations with cooper

Bernard Rudofsky’s Streets for People;

Morgan made his specialty the refinancing, reorganization, and rationalization of America’s badly overextended and overcapitalized railroads; his “clients” included some of the largest, such as the Erie, the New York Central, and the Pennsylvania.

The broad powers possessed by the Board of Estimate, the upper house of the city’s bicameral legislature, would normally have made ignoring it impossible. But many of those powers rested on the power of the purse and the purse that was financing most of Moses’ projects was not the Board’s but the federal government’s. And the power that remained to