ROMAN MARS: Hello, beautiful nerds. It’s Roman here. If you’re loving 99% Invisible and want to hear new episodes, ad-free, and get access to exclusive bonus content like AMAs with me and producers on staff, subscribe to SiriusXM podcast plus on Apple Podcasts to start your free trial today.
This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars. In the 50 years since The Power Broker was published, the book has endured in ways that few biographies have. First and foremost, it completely upended how the public viewed the former New York City parks commissioner, Robert Moses. He went from being the man who built all those nice parks to an urban design villain. If you’ve been following along with the 99% Invisible Breakdown of The Power Broker, you know what I’m talking about. And you also know that, last month I was at the New York Historical Society with my co-host, Elliott Kalan, to interview Robert Caro, the author of The Power Broker, live on stage.
The New York Historical Society holds Robert Caro’s archives, which include his research for The Power Broker as well as the papers for his four volume biography of President Lyndon Johnson. At 89 years old, Caro is still working on the fifth and final installment To celebrate 50 years of The Power Broker, the society went into their archives and curated a special exhibit that is a must-see for any Power Broker reader. There are so many amazing documents on display. There’s Caro’s handwritten notes from his interview with Lillian Edelstein, who tried and failed to stop Moses from tearing down her home in East Tremont to make way for the Cross Bronx Expressway. And next to that, there’s notes from Caro’s interview with Robert Moses on his side of the story. You can see in his notes where Moses told Caro that the opposition was “a political thing that stirred up the animals there.” There’s also pages from early drafts of The Power Broker with huge slashes through entire paragraphs made by Caro’s editor, Robert Gottlieb. Caro often says that he cut 350,000 words around a third of his initial draft of The Power Broker, partly because the publisher could not bind a book that would hold that many pages. It was physically impossible to release a book of that size. And woven throughout the exhibit are examples of Caro’s famous attention to detail, which just floored Elliott and me when we saw it.
ELLIOTT KALAN: One of the things I admire so much about Robert Caro’s work is that he goes everywhere and that these notes here about the west bathhouse at this beach… “The west bathhouse beach is practically deserted at 10:38. Of course, it’s v cold… A new PULSE student… It’s generally pretty empty here except for Tuesdays and Fridays.” Just how many people he must have talked to at all different levels of wherever he was– I don’t think he set up an appointment with this new PULSE student that works as a lifeguard at the beach. I think he just went and started interviewing people. And it’s the way to do it and just to have the confidence to do it. I can’t do that. Just walk up to somebody and start interviewing them?
ROMAN MARS: If you’re in New York City, you should definitely make a trip to the New York Historical Society to check out the exhibit. And now, here’s Elliott and me interviewing Robert Caro live on stage.
ELLIOTT KALAN: Thank you so much everybody for joining us tonight. I know, speaking for Roman and myself, we’re so excited to be here. We’re so honored to be here with Mr. Caro. And Mr. Caro, thank you so much for joining us tonight. It just means more than we can say to be talking with you. I know we only have about an hour. We’ve got to move really fast. So…
[LAUGHTER]
ELLIOTT KALAN: Page one…
[LAUGHTER]
ELLIOTT KALAN: No, that was my dumb comedy opening bit. Thank you everybody for indulging me with that. I appreciate it.
ROMAN MARS: So, what I was hoping is that you could take us back to the moment before the publication of The Power Broker–either the excerpts in The New Yorker or the book itself. Were you more concerned that no one was going to read it or that one person in particular was about to read it?
ROBERT MOSES: Well, I knew Robert Moses was going to attack it because he attacked anything he didn’t like. I knew he was great with words. Robert Moses, when he was at Yale, was a poet–and he was actually a good one. He coined a good phrase about me: “venomous viper.” And the New York Times then would print anything Robert Moses said as fact. So, the headline was: “Caro ‘Venomous Viper,’ Moses says.”
ROMAN MARS: Wow. And what did that feel like when you heard “venomous viper?” Were you prepared for it?
ROBERT MOSES: That he would attack me?
ROMAN MARS: I mean, just what did it mean to be attacked by him? I mean, you had done so much work. Your opinion of him was right there in black and white. But did it do something? What did it feel like when you finally got that type of reaction from him?
ROBERT MOSES: Well, I was expecting the book wouldn’t sell very many copies. And I was sort of overwhelmed by the reception. I’ll tell you one anecdote. My first review in The New York Times was not wholly favorable. So, in those days, if my publisher expected you to have a lot of interviews, they gave you someone’s office who was on vacation. So, I was sitting in there having digested this review. And suddenly, Joseph Heller was standing in the doorway. Now his book, Something Happened, was published the same month as The Power Broker. And so I would see him in the halls, but I was too much in awe. I would say hello. We used to say hello. I was too much in awe. We never had had a conversation. And there he is suddenly standing in the doorway. I later figured out that Bob Gottlieb said, “Go in there and cheer him up.” And he says… He had this kind of voice. “Hey kid, great review this morning.” And I said something like, “Oh, I don’t know what was so good.” And he said, “You don’t understand.” He says, “The only thing that matters is the space. This guy usually only writes this low. For you, he wrote this.”
ELLIOTT KALAN: So, that’s Robert Moses’ reaction–negative. The Times reaction–mixed. I was wondering… The names on the cover of the book are Robert Moses and Robert Caro. But there’s so many people in this book. There’s so many people whose stories you tell and whose names you bring attention to when another book might have glossed over them. And I assume on the assumption that if everyone who’s mentioned in the book buys a copy, you’re good for, like, a couple dozen copies. But I was wondering if you had received any reaction after publication from anyone you talked about in the book–any of the people like Lillian Edelstein or anyone like that? How did they feel about the way their stories were told, if you heard from them?
ROBERT MOSES: There are a lot of people–a lot of different chapters. The most moving thing for me were the people of the Cross Bronx–the people who were thrown out for the Cross Bronx Expressway. And that morning I had interviewed two people–two couples. One lived in Co-op City, and one lived with their kids. And that afternoon I had an interview with Robert Moses. So, my first question was, “What do you think the effect was on the people who live there?” And I still remember. And if I didn’t remember, it’s in that notebook. “Oh,” he said, “there was very little hardship there at all. They stirred up the animals. But I just stood fast, so I won.” That’s not quite answering your question.
ELLIOTT KALAN: I noticed.
[LAUGHTER]
ELLIOTT KALAN: I’ve learned from you.
ROBERT MOSES: I’m leading up to your question. The book is long.
[LAUGHTER]
ROBERT MOSES: But over the years, over and over again, I’d be giving a talk somewhere and someone would come up to me and say, “I lived on 187th Street,” or “I lived on Southern Boulevard, and I’m so glad that you told what happened to us.” So, that was a reaction. People in power were enraged at the book. Mayor Wagner was enraged at it and issued a really strong statement, denouncing it. And you’re not really used to that, to tell you the truth. And you keep wondering if you did something wrong. But it sort of faded away, I must say, rather quickly. And all of a sudden people were talking about The Power Broker in their columns or in a way that really made me feel good.
ELLIOTT KALAN: Wonderful.
ROMAN MARS: So, in The Power Broker, you take a lot of care as a biographer to sort of set the stage of why Robert Moses is the way he is, talking about his mother and Belle Moskowitz as well. And in the Lyndon Johnson books, you even go deeper into, like… What is the soil composition of the hill country to lead him to be who he is? And I wonder… This part of you–this core of you–that is so attuned to the people who have less power and so committed and driven to telling their story, where does that come from for you? Where did you get that impulse?
ROBERT MOSES: Oh, no one’s ever asked me that. But I’ll tell you, it started actually on Newsday, when I was still working just nights. And I came across… They were taking… I’m trying to think of a– I’m editing myself now. So, the story will be–
ELLIOTT KALAN: There’s no editor here. You can finally talk at length however long you want.
ROBERT MOSES: There was a huge thing going on where conmen were selling retirement home sites in the Mojave Desert aiming at the widows of patrolmen in the PBA and firemen. And I’d never done an investigative piece. For some reason it struck me that something was wrong. And I remember I went to Alan Hathway, who was this tough, old managing editor, and I said, “I’d like to go out to Arizona.” I’ve never done anything like this before. And for some reason, he authorized me to spend the time at– I went to the Mojave Desert, and there was nothing there. They had pictures of the beautiful country club and the swimming pool. There was nothing there. There was just a sign: “This is Rio Rancho Estates” or something. So, I started to look into this and I went to the county clerk’s office and I saw the vast scope of this thing. Tens of thousands of people had actually bought land out there that they could never get water from. There was no water and there was… And I didn’t know what to do with it. I had never done a long story. And I remember, the next day, I was driving around the desert. And I came to the top of a rise. And there below me was an old lady carrying two buckets of water. And it appeared to me she was carrying from nowhere to nowhere. When I drove over the next rise, I saw she had sort of a corrugated iron. She had built sort of a corrugated tin shack. And I looked at her as she was coming. And I suddenly said, “You don’t have to explain everything to people. You just have to tell about her.” And that worked, as it happened. And after that, I just always felt attracted to the people who were hurt. That’s about all I can say.
ROMAN MARS: I mean, I think you feel it in the work. But I think one of the reasons why it endures is that thing–not just the story of Moses but the story of all these other people.
ROBERT MOSES: Thank you.
ELLIOTT KALAN: This is going to seem like a non-sequitur question after that very dramatic answer and question, but it’s related in a way. Something that sticks out to me from that reporting series that you did is the picture you took where you are sitting at a table with a bottle of wine in the middle of nowhere for that Newsday article. And it’s a very funny picture. And in The Power Broker, something that I feel like does not get talked about, but I guess maybe it stuck out to me because I’m a comedy writer by trade, is that there are times when it’s a very funny book. There’s a line in it that I love so much where you’re quoting Moses as saying traffic on the LIE will flow freely. And then you just write “inappropriate adverb” right afterwards. Or when you’re talking– I forget which bridge or expressway it is that… The press is saying, “This will solve traffic forever.” And then there’s a space. And then afterwards it just says, “It solved it for about two weeks.” And I wondered if, while you were writing it, there were times when you were aware of how funny those lines are and if it ever felt strange or if there were times when you were like, “This book’s getting a little dry. I need to put a joke in somewhere.” There’s just something very New York about speaking that way and writing that way. I was wondering if comedy ever came into your mind while you’re writing it because there are very funny parts to the book.
ROBERT MOSES: Well, I wouldn’t say that was a funny line. I would say that’s a line to hit hard. In my writing, I do pay a lot of attention to first lines and last lines–maybe Bob Gottlieb would say too much. But it just sort of came naturally, actually, to me.
ELLIOTT KALAN: It really feels like… Perhaps it’s that your feeling for rhythm is so strong that you’re tapping into that rhythm that maybe I’m reading it as a comedy rhythm. But it makes it such a lively book. It makes it such a living book that you have this feel for the rhythm of the words. And there was, on the episode that we just recorded, I think–the chapter Rumors and the Report of Rumors–where you’re saying, “For so-and-so, it was garbage cans. For so-and-so, it was…” Like, your opening lines are so fantastic for each of those sections in that chapter. Did you find it was hard to come up with those opening lines, or did they come to you like a lightning bolt?
ROBERT MOSES: No, hard.
ELLIOTT KALAN: [LAUGHTER]
ROBERT MOSES: I am glad you used the word “rhythm” twice in the thing.
ELLIOTT KALAN: I should have used it three times! That would’ve been better for rhythm–three times.
ROBERT MOSES: Even better because–if I can just digress–people say, “Nobody reads history anymore. We’re not interested in history.” But the fact is, I think, history is fascinating and anyone would be interested in it if it’s written the way it is. History is a wonderful story–very dramatic. What’s happening in America today–how much more dramatic can you be? It’s like a horrible but fascinating movie. So, I have always, for some reason, felt that the rhythm of the words was very important. I don’t know that anybody agrees with me, but I think that more people would read history if history was written with more attention to the things that novelists–fiction writers… The rhythm of sentences, the rhythm of words… There is, I believe, the right word for what you’re trying to say, even if you have to spend a long time thinking about that word–looking for that word. So, the answer to your question is it’s deliberate. That’s all I have to say.
ROMAN MARS: We noticed–as we’re talking about it on the podcast, and we go chapter by chapter–one of the things I love and love noting and talking about is the way that each chapter has a bit of a cliffhanger to get you to read the next one. And it’s really– I just think the wordsmithing is just so much fun. It seems like very newspaper writing–just get you to the next thing. “I want to read the next thing right now.”
ROBERT MOSES: Well, I want ’em to read the next thing.
ROMAN MARS: And I also wondered in terms of this–
ROBERT MOSES: Oh, could I?
ROMAN MARS: Yeah, please.
ROBERT MOSES: In the answer to your question… I didn’t mean to interrupt.
ROMAN MARS: You answering the question is why we’re all here.
ROBERT MOSES: I’ve said it before on television, but I don’t know that people saw it. I mean, when I was starting the book… I do all my– And particularly on The Power Broker, I did all my research before I started the book. And then I realized nobody’s going to read this book. No one really knew who Robert Moses was. They certainly didn’t know there was an interesting story there. I said, “How am I going to get them to read this book? And I have to do an introduction that tells people what he’s done.” And I couldn’t figure out– I mean, you talk about time–days! I couldn’t figure out a way to do it. But I thought, “Well, who else wrote about someone who had so much accomplishment?” Homer in the Iliad. So, I said, “How did he do that?” And I remember I went and said, “Oh, he did it by listing the countries that sense ships one after the other. Somehow that draws you into the book–the rhythm in which he wrote.” So, I said, “I’ll try to do that with his highways because if you just say he built 627 miles of expressways and parkways, that’s not going to get anyone to read the book.” So, I listed them. That didn’t do anything. I said, “So what’s the rhythm here?” I said, “What if I find a rhythm that draws people in?” And that was a deliberate thing I was thinking of. And I listed them over and over again. And they came out different. Suddenly, I saw they’re coming out in a rhythm. Now, I’m almost there. And I don’t say I succeeded in getting there, but that’s what I was trying to do.
So, if you’re talking about something in government or history that seems dry, if it’s dry, then it’s dry. But if it’s dramatic–if there’s a man trying to put a highway through a crowded area and throw all the 15,000 people out with no place to go–you say, “That’s a story.” And you got to find a way to tell it as a story. And that takes a long time sometimes.
ELLIOTT KALAN: I mean, from the point of view of me–someone who did not have to do that work and just gets to read it–the time seems very well worth it because the book is so beautiful. And an indication of that, which I think we have not talked about on the podcast, is that I have a 10-year-old son and there are nights when, before he goes to bed, he asks me to read him a page or two of The Power Broker.
[LAUGHTER]
ELLIOTT KALAN: And he particularly likes those lists in the introduction. And he’ll ask me to read him those pages–the lists of the expressways and the bridges. And I think it’s that rhythm that captures him. And he doesn’t know those places. And it’s made it very hard to continue through the book at a pace that… It’s going to take a while to finish reading it–a page or two at a time to him at bedtime. But it’s such a… I feel like there’s no other work of history that I can think of that my 10-year-old is asking me to read to him at bed to get him into that– And it doesn’t lull him to sleep. I have to stop because he’s not sleeping, and I have to leave the room. But it’s that rhythm, I think, that really captures him. Even just the sounds of those words are so beautiful–the way you put them together.
ROBERT MOSES: Well, you just made my day. Thank you very much. That’s something I’ll remember. Thank you.
ELLIOTT KALAN: Well, I’ll tell him you said that.
ROMAN MARS: When you’re writing, how much are you balancing being a historian and making sure that this number is out there for people to have for all time versus moving the story dramatically? Talk about the difficulty of that. That seems very hard.
ROBERT MOSES: That’s really hard. Sometimes you feel you are trapped by the facts. You know this is a dramatic scene. Like, right now in the book I’m writing now–
ELLIOTT KALAN: Oh, you’re working on a book right now? I had no idea. I didn’t realize.
[LAUGHTER]
ROBERT MOSES: It’s about Lyndon Johnson.
[LAUGHTER]
ROMAN MARS: Oh, is it?
ELLIOTT KALAN: Okay, interesting.
ROMAN MARS: It’s a good subject.
ROBERT MOSES: And he’s passing Medicare. And it’s changing the financing of the social security system. And it’s really dry. It’s really a lot of numbers. But more than that, a very complicated fight is going on in the Ways and Means committee because the chairman, Wilbur Mills, of Arkansas doesn’t want Medicare because he thinks it’s going to destroy the financing of the social security system. And this is a chapter about numbers, and it’s really dry. It may be boastful to say, but you say, “No, it’s not dry. This is all the people in the United States who had to choose between financing sending their kids to college and taking care of their grandparents because there is no Medicare. That’s not dry. You have to take these numbers and find a way of weaving them into something so people understand how big this question is.” That’s a very good question. That’s an extreme example, but you’re constantly stuck by facts.
ROMAN MARS: And these numbers. Yeah.
ELLIOTT KALAN: One of the things that makes your writing so powerful is there’s this passion behind it. There’s this excitement behind it about making sure people know these– If you didn’t have books, I imagine you running out into the streets saying, “People need to know this!” and just grabbing people and telling them.
ROBERT MOSES: I’ve never done that.
[LAUGHTER]
ELLIOTT KALAN: Well, luckily you’ve got the books to put them through. You should try it sometime. It gets the blood racing. Do you ever find you’re in danger of losing that passion because you’re digging through numbers or because you’re struggling to find just the right words? Is it hard to maintain that sense of energy that you need to get through the book to make people interested?
ROBERT MOSES: You ask good questions. All the time, actually, because you say if you do it by concentrating on individuals–telling their stories–first place, it’s going to take an additional two weeks or two months or something. And you don’t know how to do it when you first think of it, you know? What you just asked is what takes so long. I know it takes my books– They’re too long. It takes too long. But I could do it a lot shorter in time and in length. But my feeling is then people wouldn’t read it. People wouldn’t understand why it’s important. President Kennedy is assassinated. And that night, Lyndon Johnson is back in Washington. He’s in his bed. He calls Bill Moyers, Jack Valenti, and Cliff Carter–three of his young aides–in. And he starts talking about what we’re going to do. He says, “I’m going to pass Harry Truman’s health bill for him.” Well, the story of how he passes the health bill could be a very dry story. It’s changing votes in the Senate and in the Ways and Means committee in the House. You say, “Yes, but this is a really important thing in American history. It’s a government trying to take care of…” So how does that work out? How does he get it through, and how does it work out? So, you really spend a lot of time just staring at a piece of paper and wondering how to do it.
ROMAN MARS: More of our conversation with Robert Caro live from the New York Historical Society coming up…
[AD BREAK]
ROMAN MARS: So, we have a few questions from the audience I wanted to run past you. How do you hope future generations will use The Power Broker and, in particular, your archive that’s upstairs–your 20,000 linear feet of miles of archives?
ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s rare when an author’s work is measured in linear feet.
[LAUGHTER]
ROMAN MARS: What do you feel when someone’s going through that stuff that you probably meant for no one to read but yourself and Ina?
ROBERT MOSES: Oh, great question. You do feel funny about that. But there’s so much in it, in the archives, that no one knows that I want people to know. I’ll give you one quick example. Al Smith was the governor of New York. Franklin Roosevelt, when he was president, said to Francis Perkins, “You know, Francis, 90% of everything we did in the New Deal Al Smith did in New York.” New York was first in welfare–first in all the things we think of today–helping people out. And it’s all because this guy–unlettered, had to drop out of school in the fifth grade, and was once called “Tammany’s leading henchman”–says to the forces of Tammany, “I’m governor now, you have to free me,” and gets all this passed. I learned about him because he raised Robert Moses to power. And I said, “This is the greatest story.” And I did write a lot on Al Smith, which we cut out of The Power Broker. Now, when I was researching, I said, “I’m going to try to find– There’s no good book–not even a half good book–on Al Smith.” So I said, “Well, I’m going to try to find everybody who was truly close to him–truly not bullshit, but really worked with him.” So, there were 14 people, as I recall, left alive. And I did extensive interviewing with them and typed them up, as I do, as transcripts. And they’re in that archive. And I’m hoping someone will come along and do a biography of Al Smith.
ELLIOTT KALAN: Don’t look at me Roman.
[LAUGHTER]
ROMAN MARS: It seems like your territory.
ELLIOTT KALAN: I do, like, Ghostbuster stuff. I don’t know this. I’m not good enough for this.
ROBERT MOSES: But if they do it, they’ll be able to talk about what it was like working with him. The same thing with Belle Moskowitz. No one even knows the name Belle Moskowitz. In the 1920s, a woman named Belle Moskowitz was arguably–I think definitely–the most powerful woman politically in the United States. Nobody even knows her name. So, I also did a lot of interviewing on her. There’s so much in my archives that didn’t make it into the book. I mean, even though I wrote it, we cut out 350,000 words.
[LAUGHTER]
ROBERT MOSES: Not so funny!
[LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE]
ELLIOTT KALAN: But piggybacking off of that, Roman and I got to look at The Power Broker at 50 exhibit right before we were doing this event. And on the wall, there’s a napkin that you wrote a note on about “the women of East Tremont went to see Fiddler on the Roof.” And for me–someone… It was two sacred things, The Power Broker and Fiddler on the Roof, in one document. And I found myself so kind of affected by seeing it–so overcome by it–and it made me think, “This is a note that Mr. Caro jotted down for his book.” This book that so many people have this very deep connection to and they get very obsessed with it and it becomes very special to them. And they read the book, and it’s all they want to talk about. And do you find that weird at all?
[LAUGHTER]
ELLIOTT KALAN: I’m asking for a friend. Do you think it’s weird that people get so wrapped up in The Power Broker–in your work but in The Power Broker especially? Does that ever feel strange to you?
ROBERT MOSES: Well, what’s your question?
[LAUGHTER]
ELLIOTT KALAN: I guess the most basic way to boil it down is do you think I’m weird for taking this book and it feeling so special to me, as someone who has only read it? I assume you’re mostly thankful, but does it ever feel strange that it’s become such a talisman for people?
ROBERT MOSES: It just makes me feel so humble. The 50 years passed so fast. But I ride that number one train a lot. And Columbia students are on there, and apparently they teach The Power Broker in a couple of courses. So, for 50 years, I’ve said to Ina, “I saw the most wonderful thing today: another kid who was reading The Power Broker.” So, on the other hand, the things that were cut out of it–what you just referred to… So, as I said, everybody was thrown out and they scattered to the four winds. I said, “How different is that from Lazar destroying Tzeitel?” And we went to see Fiddler on the Roof. And the last song is Anatevka. And if you remember, in the staging that I saw, they are singing “Anatevka, Anatevka, a place where you know everyone you meet and you’ll be in the place where you’re looking for one familiar face.” And I said, “Oh, that’s…” I’m going to do a chapter on that.” And evidently I didn’t remember this. They showed me the napkin. I evidently wrote that down.
ELLIOTT KALAN: Probably went to dinner after the show, and we think about it.
ROBERT MOSES: Yeah, yeah. And I wrote it. So, there was a chapter called One Mile Afterwards, okay? We had to cut it. Bob Gotlieb–he said, I think, that I cut 350,000 of the best words I ever– Well, I think that’s about the best chapter I ever wrote. And we just cut it down to six pages or something like that. So, you have so many mixed feelings about that book.
ROMAN MARS: So, I have another question from the audience. It says, “After 50 years of reflection, would you portray Moses any differently today?”
ROBERT MOSES: No.
[LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE]
ROMAN MARS: Yeah, I didn’t think so. Nailed it!
ELLIOTT KALAN: I know. I’m finding myself, uh… It’s hard for me to… For the past couple days, it’s been very hard for me to formulate into question form the things that I want to say to you about the book. Does it ever… Well, actually, I apologize. Roman, you ask a question. I get very emotional about it.
ROMAN MARS: This relates to the exhibit a little bit. So I’m–
ELLIOTT KALAN: Good. That’s a great idea, Roman. Ground it in something. Yeah. Other than my beating heart for this book–yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
ROMAN MARS: So, the book is subtitled The Fall of New York. How responsible was Moses for this fall? Also, were other subtitles considered? And I know the answer to this because I saw one of ’em out there. So, talk about the subtitle, the Fall of New York.
ROBERT MOSES: Well, the easy answer to that is it’s published in 1974–New York was bankrupt. When you looked into it, in the book, it shows how his spending on a number of things really crippled the city’s financial capacity. But that’s not all I meant. I meant that, by the time he finished being in power, you had a study where there were–if I have this right–144,000 units of public housing that were built in the cheapest possible way because he wanted people who were poor to feel poor. And they didn’t have what La Guardia wanted–to put social workers in so that people from rural areas of the south could have someone help them so you had a city. That’s part of New York. New York is by some the most segregated city in America. You have a city where people commute… The commuting time in New York then was… I forget how they measured it. It was one of the longest commutes in the world.
ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s still pretty bad. Rereading the book this time… I’ve lived in Los Angeles for a few years now, but I lived in New York for a number of years. And I would read about the potential for a better subway system, and I would just think about the hours I spent waiting in trains that had stopped in tunnels in my years here. And it was making me so angry. Yeah, that’s another way the city fails its residents as a result of the things Moses was doing.
ROBERT MOSES: Yes. That’s the kind of thing I meant. And Black people were still not using Jones Beach. He didn’t want poor people in general and people of color in particular to use Jones Beach. So, he did a number of things, which everyone talks about and some academics try and put a different reason on it. But the people who built it knew why he was making the overpasses too low for buses to get through. And I remember his chief engineer, Sid Shapiro, saying, “This is an example of–” They called them R.M. “This was an example of R.M.’s wonderful foresight because we had legislation passed that buses couldn’t use the parkways.” But legislation can be changed. It’s really hard to change a bridge while it’s up. So, I said to Ina, “I want to see if that still works.” So, let’s say this was 1970. I don’t know what year it was. We went out there, and we stood. In Jones Beach, there’s a main parking lot, which holds 10,000 cars. And everybody who parks there–you have to go through an overpass with three archways. So, Ina and I stood there with two pads. And you did, like, four lines and then across. If you go up to the second floor of this museum, there’s the pad and there’s the entire page down to the bottom under whites. That’s how many whites used it. There are, as I recall, 14 Latinos and, I think, just five Black people. So, his stratagem worked. So, that’s part of what I meant by the Fall of New York. We had all these vast slums living in these housing projects built as cheaply as he could build them. We had an education system. When he did the World’s Fair, he said he would have–and the number kept going up–20 million, 40 million, $80 million the Fair would profit, and he’d turned it over to the education system. Well, as it happens, I was the reporter who found out the Fair was bankrupt. So, in a way… Anyway, that kind of thing is what I meant.
ROMAN MARS: Well, it’s been such a delight talking with you. Thank you so much for the book. And when I think about this book, I know that maybe people see it as this 1,200 page book of this dastardly man, Robert Moses. But what I want people to understand is the pleasure of the book is spending 1,200 pages with this kind humanist who cares about this city and this country and this world in the form of you. And I think one of the things that makes it endure for 50 years is your care that you give to the work and to all that you do. So, thank you so much for everything.
ROBERT MOSES: Thank you.
[RAUCOUS APPLAUSE]
ROBERT MOSES: Thank you.
ROMAN MARS: You may have noticed something that we did not ask Robert Caro about that many people want to know: what happened to the chapter in The Power Broker that was devoted to Jane Jacobs? So, here’s the backstory. Jane Jacobs was a journalist and activist who, in the 1950s, helped organize a successful opposition to the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would’ve cut through neighborhoods like Soho, Little Italy, and Chinatown. Jacobs went on to write The Life and Death of Great American Cities, this incredible book that delivers a withering critique of the urban renewal concepts and other harmful policies that Moses championed. In the early stages of The Power Broker, Caro wrote about Jacob’s fight with Moses. But ultimately, her name does not appear in the book. We didn’t ask Caro about the Jane Jacobs chapter because he’s been asked about this so many times–over and over again–and his response is always: “I can’t remember what’s in that chapter.” But one of the last pieces in the New York Historical Society’s exhibit is a letter from Jane Jacobs to Robert Caro, from August, 1974, shortly before the book was published.
ROMAN MARS (AT EXHIBIT): So it says, “Dear Mr. Caro, many, many thanks for the copy of The Power Broker, which I treasure, and also for your too generous but much appreciated inscription. I have no doubt that many readers are going to feel the way I do. We owe you a tremendous debt for all those years of work, good sense, unflagging curiosity, and compassion. I don’t think anybody but a genuinely compassionate person–I do not mean sentimental–could have written that book. What an account it is of human…”
ELLIOTT KALAN (AT EXHIBIT): “Predicaments?”
ROMAN MARS (AT EXHIBIT): Yeah, “predicaments.” sorry. There’s a little hyphen that goes into another word going up the side.
ELLIOTT KALAN (AT EXHIBIT): It’s weird when you see a handwritten note where someone has a hyphen where they continue a word on the next line. That’s a writer–that’s a real writer.
ROMAN MARS (AT EXHIBIT): “it is of human predicaments. It ranks with the great novels in that respect. Well, you deserve a commensurate vacation. But Mary Nichols has told me that you are instead at work on a biography of La Guardia. Selfishly, I can’t help but be glad. I look forward to that. It so much needs to be done, and nobody could do it as well. Thank you again for sending the book but especially for having written it in the first place. Sincerely, Jane Jacobs.” I’m sorry to say, Jane Jacobs, he did not write that biography of La Guardia.
ELLIOTT KALAN (AT EXHIBIT): No. Jane Jacobs would go to her grave awaiting that La Guardia biography.
ROMAN MARS: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Isabel Angell, edited by committee. Music by Swan Real. mixed by Martín Gonzalez. Special thanks to the folks at the New York Historical Society for Making Elliott and my dreams come true.
Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. Taylor Shedrick is our intern. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jayson De Leon, Emmett FitzGerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Laha Madan, Gabriella Gladney, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Neena Pathak, me, Roman Mars, and Jeyca Medina Gleason. Congratulations to you and Billy, Jeyca. It’s just so nice to see two lovely young people get married and just… We’re so happy for you.
The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building… in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California. You can find the show on all the usual social media sites as well as our own Discord server, where we have a fun time talking about Power Broker. We talk about architecture, movies, and music–all kinds of good stuff. It’s where I’m hanging out most of these days. You can find a link to that Discord server every past episode of 99PI and catch up with The Power Broker Breakdown at 99pi.org.
VOICE (AT EXHIBIT): I wonder what the inscription said.
ELLIOTT KALAN (AT EXHIBIT): Yeah.
ROMAN MARS (AT EXHIBIT): I know. That would be something.
ELLIOTT KALAN (AT EXHIBIT): I wonder if it was like, “Dear Jane, here’s my book. Thanks for your part. Sorry you’re not in the book.”
ROMAN MARS (AT EXHIBIT): [LAUGHS] Yeah. I wonder if there’s part of the Jane Jacobs archive that has it.
ELLIOTT KALAN (AT EXHIBIT): This is now our next podcast series–the mystery of tracking down that description. We’ll do one of those episodes of a podcast where you follow the whole hunt and then you find it at the end and you could have just said what happened at the end.
ROMAN MARS (AT EXHIBIT): Or you find nothing probably.
ELLIOTT KALAN (AT EXHIBIT): Yeah, that’s more likely.
ROMAN MARS (AT EXHIBIT): That’s the podcast M.O.–to make it all about the process because there is no answer. The answer is truth or something. I don’t know.
ELLIOTT KALAN (AT EXHIBIT): It turns out the answer was the friends we made along the way.
ROMAN MARS (AT EXHIBIT): The nature of truth and the friends we made along the way.
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