Sublime

Robert Moses built ten new community swimming-pool complexes in New York City during the 1930’s. Because of his fascination with water in general and swimming in particular, Moses gave each of the pools, for which he had obtained a special WPA grant of $10,000,000, his personal attention.

Neighborhood feelings, urban planning considerations, cost, aesthetics, common humanity, common sense—none of these mattered in laying out the routes of New York’s great roads. The only consideration that mattered was Robert Moses’ will. He had the power to impose it on New York.

Moses built one pool in Harlem, in Colonial Park, at 146th Street, and he was determined that that was going to be the only pool that Negroes—or Puerto Ricans, whom he classed with Negroes as “colored people”—were going to use. He didn’t want them “mixing” with white people in other pools, in part because he was afraid, probably with cause, that “t

When Moses submitted a preliminary outline of suggested commission goals, he included a phrase straight out of the reform textbooks and his Municipal Civil Service Commission days: “Elimination of unnecessary…personnel.” Mrs. Moskowitz struck the phrase out. Personnel, she said, were voters. You didn’t antagonize voters.

And all of this increased dependency on the car. Before 1920, most American city dwellers had commuted to work on foot or by public transport. But during the 1950s commuting by car became the norm and has been ever since: today eight in ten Americans drive to work, usually alone. Zoning rules contributed to car dependency in the new suburbs by stri

He had to drive 110 unnecessary miles per week, 5,500 per year—all because of Moses’ “compromise.” By the 1960’s there were about 21,500 such commuters, and the cost to them alone of Moses’ accommodation totaled tens of millions of wasted hours of human lives.

The first thing to understand is that the public peace—the sidewalk and street peace—of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves. In some city areas—olde