Sublime

meet him off Gravesend with a barge

In 1974, people using subways and railroads in and around New York were still riding on tracks laid between 1904 and 1933, the last year before Robert Moses came to power in the city. Not a single mile had been built since.

Agassiz produced a stream of articles for Atlantic Monthly and carried the fight to the lecture circuit, his popularity soaring to new heights. The articles, published as a book, Methods of Study in Natural History, went through nineteen editions. To know that Agassiz of Harvard decried the theories of Charles Darwin, that he, of all learned men, m

“The city didn’t have the money for a crossing. Neither did the Tunnel Authority. Only one person had the money—Moses. And Moses wasn’t giving us any choice. He just wouldn’t build a tunnel. It was the bridge or nothing. Take it or leave it. We didn’t have any choice.”

Geographical curiosity and his abiding love for wilderness travel seem to have been the main reasons for these journeys, but he usually managed to find some practical, economic rationale: a railroad survey, a party of miners that wanted to be guided to some remote mountain range, a potential livestock market that called for investigation. In 1858 h

If Moses attempted to employ on the canvas of New York City the same broad brush strokes that he had used on the canvas of Long Island, he would be obliterating the city’s intricacies indiscriminately instead of working around those that were worth keeping and preserving them—and while this method might result in the creation of something beautiful

But in most of Moses’ attacks, brilliance was made the slave of rage. The scalpel was discarded in favor of the bludgeon—and the swings Moses took with the latter weapon were wild indeed.

city. If, moreover, Moses’ authorities were becoming an independent empire, the heart’s blood of that empire was money: tolls. The bulk of those tolls were collected at the huge Triborough Bridge toll plaza. If the empire had a heart, that was it. Moses built his new office in the very shadow of that toll plaza.