The Power Broker #8: Shiloh Frederick

ROMAN MARS: This is the 99% Invisible Breakdown of the Power Broker. I’m Roman Mars.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And I’m Elliott Kalan.

ROMAN MARS: So, today, we’re still in Part Six: The Lust for Power, covering Chapters 33 and 34, pages 703 to 806 in my book. And later in this episode, our special guest is Shiloh Frederick, born and raised in New York City. Shiloh is a writer and influencer who shares her love of the city’s history and architecture on Instagram and TikTok. Last year, she chronicled her rather ambitious plan to read The Power Broker in 30 days. And her viral videos about her endeavor ended up making some real change in the city, specifically some real change to some Moses-designed ornamentation in the city. But before we get to all that, we wanted to announce something very special. On October 7th, Elliott and I are talking with the great Robert Caro live on stage at the New York Historical Society.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s part of the Society’s special exhibit dedicated to the 50th anniversary of The Power Broker. And I am so incredibly excited. I cannot wait to see this exhibit, and I can’t wait to talk to Robert Caro live in person. It’s a dream come true. If it had to happen in front of an audience, I guess that’s even better. So, there are witnesses that can tell me, “Yes, that did happen. You and Roman did get to talk face-to-face with Robert Caro.” So, be one of those witnesses. Be part of that moment. You can go to nyhistory.org to learn more. We’ll also put the information on 99pi.org and in the 99PI Discord server.

ROMAN MARS: So, on the last blockbuster episode of The Power Broker Breakdown, we covered Robert Moses–

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s literally busting blocks. You’re not wrong, Roman. He is busting blocks full of people.

ROMAN MARS: Robert Moses has successfully gained control of every ingress and egress to the island of Manhattan. Like, if you are in a car and you’re trying to get to Manhattan or trying to leave Manhattan and all future river crossings, you have to pay some toll. Robert Moses controls everything. Robert Caro took us through Robert Moses’ turning the public authority into this mutant form that allows him to just have this vast amount of wealth to just keep him going and keep him making new things without having to rely on the fickle public or any politician’s approval for anything. He controls so much of the money. And Moses nearly succeeds in destroying Battery Park in Downtown Manhattan with his plans to make it an on-ramp to this enormous bridge to Brooklyn. The bridge eventually doesn’t happen, but it takes the power of the President of the United States to stop him from doing this.

But he takes this yearslong revenge–like decadelong revenge–of closing New York City’s aquarium in place of Fort Clinton. And then he spends a decade trying to tear down the historic fort. Again, it just takes the federal government to stop him. And finally, this last, little bit of Moses turning into the thing he hates by lending his support to the Tammany candidate, William O’Dwyer. And in exchange for lending that support, O’Dwyer gives him the post of coordinator of all construction. He’s been the enemy of Tammany for his entire life. And now he’s this eager ally. He lends his name to support and sort of clean up the image of the Tammany candidate. And we, again, visit an old, retired, unwell former politician in the form of Mayor La Guardia. And he is talking about how much he regrets giving Moses all of this power. What La Guardia is really nervous about is that now nobody could keep Moses in check. He thought he was the last bulwark stopping Moses from running roughshod all over the city of New York. So, this episode, we’re going to be covering Chapters 33 and 34. We’re back to big, long chapters again. Pages 703 to 806 in my book. We’re continuing in the section called The Lust for Power. And this is Chapter 33, leading out the regiment. What is going on in Chapter 33, Elliott Kalan.

ELLIOTT KALAN: First, Roman, I just want to say you did an amazing job of condensing the last episode down really little. And I just want to say that there should be a podcast called The 99% Invisible Power Broker Breakdown Breakdown, where it’s just those sections at the beginning–just the catch-up sections. If you string those together, you could digest this whole book probably in, like–I don’t know–15, 20 minutes when the series is over. So, keep that in mind for the future for the ultra-abridged edition. But this chapter–let’s get into it. This is a long chapter. This is a tough chapter. We’re entering probably the hardest part of the book to really get through as a casual reader because there’s a lot of facts. There’s a lot of stuff that Caro is reporting to you about the operation of Moses’ corrupt network. And it gets very dense. And I imagine this is the part where a lot of readers of The Power Broker–they hit it and they’re like, “Hmm, I think this is where I’m getting off the train or getting out of the car.”

ROMAN MARS: Because you’re just over halfway through the book, and it’s going along. Things are happening. The chapters are getting short. You feel like you’re accomplishing a lot. Another mayor is dead. You’re just like–

ELLIOTT KALAN: He’s just throwing away mayors. Governors? They’re gone. Forget about them. Yeah.

ROMAN MARS: He’s, like, moving along. And you’re just like, “Hey, man, I’m almost halfway done with this book. This is going to just sail from here.” And then Robert Caro is like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I’m going to talk to you about bank finances and where the money corruption starts and ends.” And having read it the third time, I have found it’s where its information fits into this framework. But I do find this one a little bit hard. So, you–dear reader–if you’re also finding this section a little difficult, you are not alone. It is a little bit slower.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I hope you feel seen. I hope you feel represented. I like thinking about this book not just as a work of reporting but as a work of literature. And this is the chapter where it feels like it tips much more into the reporting part of it. This is information that is essential for people to have on paper somewhere. This is the kind of chapter that someone can use for research to understand more about the city. But as literature, it’s not as readable as–say–Paul and his brother.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. I feel like this is a compendium of Page Four of the City Section of the newspaper Robert Caro would’ve worked at had he not been working at this book. It’s a series of articles about a certain type of corruption with different names that do not stick quite in my head–with numbers that do not stick in my head. But if you are a real city council follower–a real, like, knew every boss of every sort of ward in various ways–this would be super meaningful to you at the time. And I think it reflects that sort of newspaper reporting. And this is part of it that ages a little bit in the 50 years since this thing was published. But it probably felt really, really just of the moment–just urgent and of the moment when he was writing it in this way.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, this is still living, recent history when he was writing this. This is within the past 30, 20 years of when he is writing it–whereas now it is 70 years ago. The book is 50 years old. So, it feels less… Although, I have to admit, I like to read kind of current event books from a long time ago and then think about how the people in the book have no idea what’s coming. It’s like, “You’re really obsessed with the Cold War, everybody, but guess what? In 10 years, that’s not going to be an issue.”

ROMAN MARS: I just got this book on the assassination of William McKinley written in the year he was assassinated.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Oh wow.

ROMAN MARS: And it talks about him as, like, “clearly the greatest American that we could ever produce, William McKinley.” And it’s so fascinating–the voice of the moment. It’s so cool. Anyway, let’s go back to this book. Where does this start?

ELLIOTT KALAN: This section is about corruption, right? And the chapter starts with a quote from a master corruptor, state senator, and former Tammany boss, George Washington Plunkitt–not a big name these days. But at one point, he was one of the bosses of New York politics. And he’s speaking in 1905. And the quote is about defending the idea of graft and attacking the ingratitude of people who see a problem with politicians making a few dollars off of building wonderful things for New York City. They’ve done all this great stuff for New York City, why is it so wrong that they get a little taste of it? And that is setting the tone for the whole chapter where Caro is going to be drawing a direct parallel between the Moses of the 1940s and 1950s and the Tammany men of 40, 50 years earlier that he was disgusted by when he was a young reformer at the turn of the century.

And this is also one of a series of chapters where Caro is even more leaving kind of straight overall chronology of the book. So, we’re going to be jumping around in time a little bit. This one’s more about concepts than about straightforward timelines. So, we know Moses, in the past, has used his power with the state government to compel the city government to do what he wants. But after World War II, he’s got an even bigger lever to use to push the city–and that is even more federal financing. After World War II, America wants to build. It wants to build houses. It wants to build roads. Building was effectively paused during the war because everything was going towards defeating the Nazis–a valid goal. I think we can all agree that’s a worthy thing to stop building for for a few years. But now the federal government is like, “We’re the most powerful country in the world. We want to build. Let’s do it. We’re going to spend all this money.” And Moses is so brilliant at drafting laws and so brilliant at using the system that he is going to maneuver it so that this money goes directly through his office, between the city and the federal government. And so, as Roman mentioned, mayor O’Dwyer had promised to make Moses the city construction coordinator–a job that has never existed before in the history of New York or maybe any city. I don’t know. Maybe in Paris, what was it? Haussman? Maybe that was his role?

ROMAN MARS: I don’t think he even had that much power. But yeah, totally.

ELLIOTT KALAN: O’Dwyer is like, “This is just an administrative role. It’s not a policymaking role. You will have authority to oversee all construction-related departments of the government temporarily. And you will still be subordinate to elected officials.” And Moses is like, “That’s great.”

But when he writes the law creating the post, he pulls a little of his old magic again. And in his mind, “temporary” could mean… Who knows how long? “Postwar period?” It’s always going to be postwar; the war’s over. “Elected officials?” We’ll see. And so, he puts a clause into the law saying that the city construction coordinator has the power to represent the city in its relations with cooperating state and federal agencies. And this is one of those things that he’s just so good at where it’s an innocent appearing provision, but it means that he controls the flow of information between the city and outside organizations. And so, the federal government’s going to hear what Moses wants to tell them. The city’s going to hear what Moses wants to tell them, even if that’s not what either side is actually necessarily saying. He’s monopolizing the flow of information the same way he’s monopolizing the flow of cars into and out of Manhattan. This guy is all about monopolizing. It’s the ultimate whipsaw position. He can just go, “Hey, the city said they want me to build this thing.” And the federal government’s like, “Alright.” And then he can go to the city and go, “The federal government wants to give us money for this thing.” and the city will go, “Okay.” And neither side knows that Moses is essentially presenting his own case as either side’s case.

ROMAN MARS: This is one of those things that’s so interesting to me–how Caro zeros in on this phrase. “Represent the city in its relations with cooperating state and federal agencies.” This isn’t a phrase that’s nefarious on its surface and buried and you have to unearth it and find it. I don’t think that even reads bad at all. It’s only how Moses uses it that’s bad. And it’s just incredible to me that you would have to write a law so ironclad to get around someone as devious and power hungry as Moses is. There’s just no way to stop this type of person because that phrase… I would just go over it again and again and again. “Represent the city, represent the city, represent the state, coordinate…” You’re like, “This is normal practice for a person in this type of role. “He just happens to use it to sort of dastardly ends. But it’s incredible.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It shows you that every law is a tool and that a tool is as useful as the person holding it the same way… And we’ve been doing so good, I think, at not bringing in modern day parallels. But the same way that people are like, “Yeah, I guess there’s no law in the books against trying to overthrow the government the way that Trump did it. So, what are we going to do?” That’s essentially the court being like, “Hey, no one ever wrote a law saying you shouldn’t do this because the assumption was just, of course, this is bad. Nobody’s going to do this.” And it’s hard. The law is always kind of a reactive thing unless you’re Moses and you are writing these laws with plans in mind, which is often not the way it happens.

ROMAN MARS: Or that the ultimate remedy for the law is to be removed from power by the electorate, which is not an option for Moses.

ELLIOTT KALAN: The ultimate democratic safeguard–which is if we don’t like you, you’re out–Moses is immune to that. And as we’ll see, everyone just keeps giving him more ways to do that–more ways to be immune. He’s getting super vaccines against the Democratic process. Moses–he’s not officially involved in the Housing Authority. But when O’Dwyer has vacant seats to fill in the City Housing Authority Board, Moses is like, “You should put these people on it.” And they’re his people. And in 1948, Moses convinces O’Dwyer to appoint a mayor’s slum clearance committee. And Moses is put on that. And Moses controls urban renewal in New York for a decade after that. Moses is so good at saying to O’Dwyer, “Hey, you should put me into this position.” And O’Dwyer’s like, “Yeah, that sounds good. That’s a temporary position.” And Moses is like, “This is what I do now.”

And this city construction coordinator job–Moses holds that job for more than 20 years. Ideally, this is a kind of position that ends in what? Three years? Four years after the shape of the postwar world has finished? And Caro talks a little bit about how Moses is becoming much more… What’s the word? Much more just kind of aware of his power. He’s really feeling it. He would get on the phone with Thomas Dewey, the postwar governor of New York of “Dewey defeats Truman” incorrect headline fame. Until I started reading about Thomas Dewey, seriously, there’s only two things I knew about him. One, he did not defeat Truman and the newspaper said he did. And two, in a letter to me when George W. Bush was president, my grandmother wrote to me and she said, “I hate George W. Bush more than any other elected official in my life except Thomas Dewey! He would say anything to get elected!” And I was like, “This is the only time I’ve ever really heard anything about Thomas.” She’d been burning with hatred for Thomas Dewey, someone I thought of just as a name on a newspaper. But apparently, Moses would just yell him out of the phone and call him a “stupid son of a bitch.” And Dewey would buckle under the next governor, W. Averell Harriman. He loves Moses’ abilities. He tells his staff, “Hey, get tough on Moses.” And Moses is like, “Alright, yeah, you can get tough on me. Guess what? You’re not invited to any groundbreaking ceremonies.” And the Governor’s like, “Hold on a second! Hold on a second! Wait, what if we named your big power dam The Robert Moses Power Dam? You’re great.” And he goes, “Okay, yeah, I am great. You can come back to my ribbon cutting ceremonies.” And Harriman is now playing nice with him.

Moses is sewing control of the things that politicians want and need for their reelection campaigns. And so, they bow to him, even when it’s silliness. It seems like it would be silly to put that much weight on “I’m not getting credit for this new highway exit that just got opened” or “I’m not getting credit for this housing project that’s getting opened.” But that’s what they run on. They want their names attached to it. And Moses is very good at placing his own people throughout the government. Again, we covered it. He wrote the bill that designed the state government and did a lot of work in the city government later, so he knows exactly who should be where. To have people loyal to him in positions, he starts putting secretaries for people who are not loyal to him on his payroll so that he’ll get copies of the memos that their bosses are putting out and he’ll know ahead of time if they’re trying to block his projects. That seems not cool. That seems like an illegal thing to do.

And because Moses controls so much of construction in the city and in the state, he can award jobs to contractors. And contractors may want to make nice with him so he can say to a loyal Moses person, “aAe you retiring from the city government? Okay, you can now get a big private job at this engineering firm or something like that that wants to do business with me.” He can really promise to take care of them as long as they are loyal to him. And if you’re not loyal to him, guess what? You’re going to be overseeing the grading of farm roads upstate for the rest of your career. You’re never getting promoted. And for years it’s just understood by different governors that Robert Moses decides who is getting construction contracts in New York City, what highways are going to be built, where they’re going to be built, and when they’re going to be built. And part of this is Moses also exploiting the interstate highway system, which is being built at this time. It’s a partnership between the federal and the state governments, not between federal and city governments. Moses has state power. The city government does not have state power. And it means that he just has so much massive control. And there’s a line here that just sounds so sinister that I want to read to you from the book. “Over the planning and building of arterial highways in and around the city of New York–arterial highways which would do so much to shape the future of that city–the federal and state governments had a stranglehold. The hands that implemented that stranglehold were the hands of Robert Moses.” There’s nothing positive in that right there.

ROMAN MARS: No, no. “Strangling hands” are universally bad.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes. No one wants strangling hands on their arterial highways or their arteries in general. So, these are all examples of Robert Moses using official power and connections to official power to get what he wants. Caro’s going to take us through a few other levers of power in extreme detail. Roman, feel free to pull me back when I start getting too detailed.

ROMAN MARS: But the point of this is, because Tammany’s back in power and because Robert Moses has figured out all these different ways to exact his power, he still relies on good old-fashioned greed and payoffs. And this is what Caro, like, really spends a lot of time and effort to say. Robert Moses’ reputation at the time completely avoided– He never got accused of taking money because he didn’t take personal money. But he did the same things that all these Tammany guys did for decades, just in new ways. And in fact, in a way, he was better at it because he never really took his off the top, so it was more money to spread around. You know what I mean?

ELLIOTT KALAN: This is an uncomplimentary analogy, but in a way he’s liked Charles Manson. Charles Manson did not kill anybody. He sent people to kill other people, but that still makes him part of a murder. Even though Robert Moses is not taking graft, he is not just allowing it but pushing it. And in that way, he’s just as corrupt as everybody else. But because he can point to himself and be like, “I got bills to pay, I’m in debt–look at me–I’m not living it up, I can’t be corrupt,” It means he got away with quite a bit. And so as you’re saying, Tammany is an office again. We should make it very clear–Caro goes out of his way to explain this–Tammany Hall is just a name. They’re no longer meeting in Tammany Hall, the building. And the actual building, Tammany Hall, as of 2023 is a Petco. So, it’s no longer the locus of corrupt power in New York City.

ROMAN MARS: Or is it? I don’t know.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Or maybe? I don’t know. I mean, when I was in New York, it was the New York Film Academy for quite some time. But now it’s a Petco. But everyone still just says, “Tammany Hall.” It’s a great name. But La Guardia’s out of office, O’Dwyer’s in office, and Tammany is in office. This is a city, as Caro says, “in which everything had its price.” And he talks about graft a little bit and the difference between honest graft and dishonest graft. And I do want to talk about this because I think it’s very interesting.

ROMAN MARS: I think it’s interesting, too.

ELLIOTT KALAN: So “dishonest graft” is the kind of thing that Boss Tweed did in the 1860s, 1870s where it’s like, “Hey, whenever the city gets billed for anything, I get a percentage of it, the comptroller gets a percentage of it, and the mayor gets a percentage of it. You know what? We’re just stealing money–embezzling–from the city.” Whereas, by the 20th century, you had these bosses like “Silent Charlie” Murphy and George Washington Plunkitt, who was quoted earlier. And they had the idea of “honest graft,” which is you don’t get a bribe. Instead what you do is you use your power to, say, direct a city contract to a company that you had a stake in. Or you know that some land needs to be owned by the city and you buy it ahead of time and then you sell it to the city at an inflated price. You’re getting paid money, but the city’s getting something in return. It’s getting a service or it’s getting a location. But in exchange, you are getting a little bit off the top as opposed to just saying, “Give me money. Just give me money straight.”

ROMAN MARS: It’s not direct money. But it’s recognizing, “Hey, I’m a person of power and influence. I’ve been in this city a long time. I own a little piece of this construction company. What’s the big deal?”

ELLIOTT KALAN: “Hey, why should I not hire the best construction company in the city according to me? I wouldn’t own a stake if I didn’t feel that way. Why should I deny those services to the city just because I might make a little bit of money off of it?”

ROMAN MARS: And it’s sort of, like, indirect, and it’s just laundered a little bit.

ELLIOTT KALAN: By the 1920s, it’s mostly being paid through fees.

ROMAN MARS: Well, yeah. This is the second revelation. Instead of just a little bit off the top to people who are comptrollers or people who are the mayor, they introduce the concept of the lawyer on the take.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes, where it’s like, “Hey, you’re a state legislator. You’re also a lawyer. As a state legislator, you voted for this project. You know what? Just as a private lawyer, we hired you to do some work for us. And we paid you a fee for it. And it’s on the books that way.” And Caro quotes Al Smith seeing a law student studying and saying, “There’s a young man studying how to take a bribe and call it a fee.” And if you were too worried about your name showing up in the books of that company, then you know what? You have them pay the fee to another legal firm, which then pays it to you and they take a little cut off of it. It’s honest in that it is more dishonest. It’s honest in that it is not just stealing straightforward, but there is more lying involved.

And there’s so much construction going on. There’s so many opportunities for graft now in this post-World War II world. And you remember, when Moses was a young man, he refused to pay it. He was not going to pay the price to get his things through because he had principles. Now, he is happy to pay it. And he has so much money to pay it with because he’s got control of so many different state and city public works that Caro says, “From 1945 to 1960, he had roughly three and a half billion dollars to do whatever with,” with minimal oversight. And from the Triborough Authority, he has another $750 million with no oversight. Those books are closed to the public. You cannot look at them. The only people who can is the comptroller, who can call for an audit, but it would take so many lawyers to go through those books that they would need an appropriation from the government to do that. And the government’s not going to be like, “Yeah, yeah, we’ll give you the money to hire the people to find out that we were taking bribes from the Triborough Authority. Sure, sure.” Robert Moses just has so much money on hand. At the same time, as you’re saying, he has the power of the press saying, “He’s a disinterested civil servant. He’s not interested in money. He’s not interested in patronage.” This is long after he, of course, was doling out patronage like crazy. His reputation protects him. And Caro starts going through specific examples of Moses paying out graft in the form of fees for insurance premiums–things like that. It gets very dizzying. There’s so many different examples and there’s so many different ways to do it that, I know, reading through it, I start to go into kind of a trance. And the most important thing is just to know that Caro is saying that Moses has such a good antenna for who’s in power and who’s not, that you can kind of track who’s up and who’s down in New York politics by who is getting paid these fees from Triborough Authority.

ROMAN MARS: And I’m trying to think if there is anything really salient here in one of these examples that points to something. But basically, they pull this sort of back-alley dealing of handing an envelope to somebody into all these legitimate forms of business. It’s the same principle of just paying off someone. But it just filters through more organizations, and those organizations are legal companies. I mean, that’s really it.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And the other difference is that Caro makes a point of saying it’s not explicit quid pro quos. It’s not “I’m giving you this fee in exchange for you doing this one thing for me.” It’s more like, “You’re on the team. I’m going to give you a job as the–” He talks about the legal counsel to Triborough or something like that. “You have this job. And in exchange, if the governor looks like he’s going to veto one of my projects, you just fly to Albany and tell him not to. But I’m not going to tell you to do that. You just know you’re on my team. When something is in my way, you help remove it. When I need something, you help do it for me.” But it’s not Moses calling up people with specific directives necessarily. It’s all very… I mean, again, it’s the way that Trump kind of does things or mobsters, where it’s a lot of like, “You got that thing? Okay, great. Here’s another thing. Oh, what about that thing?” It’s a lot of refusing to use details in the exact agreements. And again, Caro makes it very clear that Moses didn’t take money. But he still considers him corrupt. He writes, “In terms of money, the terms in which corruption is usually measured, Robert Moses was not himself corrupt. He was, in fact, as uninterested in obtaining payoffs for himself as any public servant who ever lived. In the politician’s phrase, he was “money honest.” But in terms of power, Robert Moses was corrupt. Coveting it, he used money to get it.” And so he becomes–even if he is not taking payoffs–the center of cash corruption in the construction trades and the building projects of New York. He’s like an octopus that’s using all of its tentacles to–I don’t know–throw fish at other octopuses, but he’s not eating any of itself. It’s a great metaphor. It’s a great analogy. Maybe Robert Caro will use it in the next edition.

ROMAN MARS: And it all comes from the fact that he has so much money for this period of time. He controls so much liquid money from all this just toll money that he can just… It’s not like he has to really lean on anyone to make them do something. He just goes, “Hey, bank. Do you want 15 million in your deposit so you can make more money off of the things that banks do to make money?” And he just gives it to them. It’s not a problem. You have to put the money in the bank. The bank makes money off it. All this sort of stuff is normal things, but the level of it and the way he kind of uses it to create this system around himself to get what he wants out of things is just… The scale of it is just so impressive.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And Caro is seeing the whole situation of power in politics in New York so holistically–every single aspect of it. So, with banks, he knows banks have political power. The people who run banks are involved with political donations in this city. And so, he can get a banker on his side by putting things in the bank. Again, there’s nothing legal about what he’s doing. He talks about dealing with the unions in the city. Unions have a lot of political power, and they also already like these projects because they’re big projects that employ a lot of people that have a lot of overtime on them. So, the heads of unions are elected by their members. And so just like any elected official in the city, they need to say to their members, “I brought all this to you, and now you’re making money.” So, he can then work with the unions to also be on his side because he can promise them certain types of projects and jobs. And he’s effectively becoming–as Caro calls me at one point in the chapter–the “Boss of Bosses,” which sounds like it’s a mafia term. But also, of all these political machine bosses–all these bosses of different types of power in New York–he is now their boss who is… Caro uses the analogy of a ward boss handing out Christmas baskets to his constituents so that he can maintain their vote. Moses handing out baskets of honest graft to his constituents, which are the behind-the-scenes power brokers and bosses of the city…

ROMAN MARS: That’s right.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And once he gives you that basket– I just keep saying “basket.” It’s not literally a basket. But once he hands you that basket, he also has a hold over you because he can say, “Remember I did that thing?” And Paul Screvane, the city council president, talks about how Mayor Robert Wagner–who we will be talking about in great length later–that he said to him, “Hey, I’m going to make you the city’s liaison for the 1964 World’s Fair, which Moses is running.” And he says, “Well, my experience with Moses taught me to accept nothing from him. Never let him do a favor for you ever. If he tries to do one, say no thank you. Just don’t accept it because he will hold it over you forever and he’ll destroy you with it.” And Screvane talks about how he would see guys who Moses had done favors for going against Moses and then Moses saying, “Get me the file. get me the file that has this thing in it.” And he knew that he could show that to whoever it was and that person would fold. It just becomes common knowledge that he has these extensive dossiers about people with compromising information about what he’s done for them and what they’ve done in return. And if you don’t accept a favor from him, it doesn’t mean you’re immune because everyone’s done something embarrassing. And he’s got his bloodhounds–not literal bloodhounds. He’s got his guys who search out compromising information. And so Caro says, “It’s not just greed that Moses is holding over people, although that’s a big part of it. It’s also fear.” You’re also afraid that Moses will make something public that you don’t want to be public. And now I’m free-floating in this book. I think we’ve talked about this before–about how if you’re a major public figure and Moses goes after you in the press, maybe you can survive it. But if you are a city bureaucrat somewhere, this is the first time your name is appearing in the newspaper, and it’s appearing with Robert Moses calling you a communist or someone connected to Robert Moses leaking information about something in your past, that could destroy you. That’s really scary. So, it’s a powerful tool.

ROMAN MARS: And Moses’ role in all this and the sort of institutions he creates and shores up are all legitimate on the surface. The banks, the bonds… Bankers want his bonds. They’re stable. They give a good return. He’s offering something that they want. But the reason why they’re so flushed to invest is because he’s parking the authority’s money with them. And all that stuff kind of works. And so when he has kind of dirt on you for giving you a little bit of this money or whatever that he could destroy you with, he’s kind of bulletproof because there’s no part of this which is actually illegal–at least as far as I can tell. I mean, he really insulates himself. And his discipline to never really wet his beak and only accrue power from it and not money is, like, a real source of his strength. He just has this discipline to keep everyone else flush, everyone else happy, and all these parts of these complicated systems working together. But he can always be the sort of pristine, clean center of it all.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes, he doesn’t show it. It’s the thing you see a lot in gangster movies. There’s the scene in GoodFellas with the fur coat. There’s the scene in American Gangster where there’s also a fur coat thing. It’s often fur coats. You pull off a job and the minute you start showing you have money, it’s trouble. And so that’s the scene in GoodFellas where he goes, “Take it back. Take it back.” He bought a fur coat for his wife, and Robert De Niro is going, “Take it back,” because if you don’t show that you have it, people aren’t going to go looking for you at it. And the thing that Caro, especially with the banks, gets to here, too, is you’re talking about those bonds. Those bonds are super attractive to banks. They pay artificially high yields. The interest rates on them are enormous that he’s paying back to them. They’re incredibly stable. They’re tax-exempt.

ROMAN MARS: And that’s one of the reasons why they return so much is they’re tax-exempt. The public authority and these bonds and all this sort of stuff is able to happen because we entrust these institutions to do things in tax-free ways to give them a little bit of leg up because they’re working for us. And that is not a problem as long as they’re working for us. But as soon as they are not, it’s just stealing from different types of people.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Because–yeah–the payback for those bonds is not… It’s not like Robert Moses is then… It’s not like he’s winning the lottery and that he’s giving that money back to the banks or his own money. The money he’s paying the banks back with is toll money. And that is money directly from New Yorkers–from people traveling through New York City. And the whole point of an authority is that it’s built, the bonds pay for its construction, the bonds are paid off, and the toll goes away. But because Moses keeps issuing these bonds, the tolls never go away. And so, New Yorkers are paying these millions and millions of dollars that the banks and everyone else are taking advantage of. They’re just paying it dime by dime by dime by dime, which adds up. Especially back then, a dime bought a lot. I forgot how much I said a dime could buy you last time. Maybe a house. Maybe you buy a house with a dime. Actually, this is, like, the ’40s, ’50s, so a dime can buy you maybe just a motorcycle. And there’s other places that Moses finds power that you wouldn’t even expect. He makes a real alliance with Cardinal Spellman of the Archdiocese of New York, the Catholic church, because he has political power–he has massive political power. He makes deals with the owners of Macy’s and Gimbels, the retail giants in the city, because they’re powerful. They control political power. Anyone who has access to political power, he is eager to work with, to make deals with, and to do favors for. There’s one point where he is planning to condemn a block of buildings so Macy’s can just build a new building there. This is not the kind of thing you’re supposed to be able to evict hundreds if not thousands of people for. And the wrong person in the government hears about it and says to the mayor, “If you don’t stop this, I’m going to go to the newspapers and say that we’re evicting all these people so Macy’s can build a new building. This is crazy.”

And at this part, it’s easy to think, “Moses is kind of working with everybody. Maybe this is a perfect system. He’s working with politicians, banks, retailers, the church, the unions… Maybe this is that perfect system where everyone gets a little bit of what they want.” But the thing is the people that that leaves out are the residents–the people who are paying the tolls and the people who are now paying higher taxes to support these things. The people in power are getting something from it. And the people who are out of power are not. But it means that all the powerful forces of the city are very much aligned behind Moses pushing for these projects. They’re all going to get something out of it.

Now–okay–there’s another center of power in the city. Let’s talk about this one. This is the one that should be stopping all this. It’s called–we mentioned it before…

ROMAN MARS: The Board of Estimate.

ELLIOTT KALAN: That’s right. It’s got an intriguing, exciting name. The Board of Estimate. The borough presidents sit on it and they control, in theory, the hiring and public works within their boroughs. This is the top of a democratic pyramid that goes down through district and county organizations. And this is the kind of stuff that we talked about back in episode two with Jamelle Bouie, where he was saying that even a corrupt democracy is built on delivering things for its constituents. It needs to get those votes. So, even a corrupt machine has to be in some way responsive to the people. If it gets too non-responsive to the people, it gets voted out of office. And the reformers unfortunately in New York kind of caused themselves some problems later on because, in 1938, they want to curb the big machine politics. So, they take a lot of that borough-centered power and they move it to central city agencies. And this is kind of similar to what is happening with the governor of New York with Al Smith back then, which is that everyone still blames the borough presidents for not doing the things they want, but they don’t really have the power to do it anymore. They can’t really control it. They are open for–let’s just say–persuasion by someone who has money and plans. But okay, hold on. They still control the power of the purse over the Board of Estimate, right? The most powerful power of all. It’s right there, I think, in the Federalist Papers. The power of the purse is the power of war and peace. It’s the power for everything. Here’s the issue. When there’s another guy who has his own purse and it’s a much bigger purse and he doesn’t need any of your power to spend money out of it, then the power of the purse is not– It’s a little bit like… I don’t remember if we used this metaphor before. It’s like if my children were playing the stock market and I was like, “If you don’t do your chores, you won’t get your allowance.” And they’d be like, “That’s fine. Tesla is up. I don’t need to do my chores to get my allowance.” I don’t know that my kids would necessarily invest in Tesla. It’s just the first company that came to mind that has volume stocks. And so the Board of Estimate only has the power to say, “No, we won’t pay for things.” It does not have the money to say, “Yes, we will pay for things.” And that’s when Moses can step in and he can say to a borough president, “Hey, do you need a project so that people will think that you can accomplish things so they’ll vote for you again? I’ve got a project.” He just opens up his coat. And there, like stolen watches, are all his plans with the budgets attached. And he’s like, “I can give you the money. I can give you the plans. But here’s the thing. You got to do it the way I tell you to do it And I know your borough. You think you know it better than I do. You maybe know what the people there need better than I do. I don’t care. I’m not open for suggestions. You gotta take it the way it is or leave it. And if you don’t take it, I will have the banks, the unions, the church, and the retail giants call you and tell you, ‘You need to take it. Why aren’t you taking it?'”

ROMAN MARS: And even the press– And he really does these awful things where someone pushes back and they go like, “Well, I don’t want this elevated highway over my church or my house. How about just a couple blocks this way?” And he calls a press conference and says, “You know that moron? He just decided he didn’t want $23 million of my money to build something.”

ELLIOTT KALAN: “I was going to spend $23 million in the Bronx. Sounds pretty good, right, people in the Bronx? Well, tell your borough president that he needs to stop because now I’m going to send it somewhere else.” And the borough president’s like, “Oh, that doesn’t look good.” So much of Moses’ power comes from, one, people being afraid to let him resign and having this bluff that no one will call, and two, being able to say to people, “You need this money. You want this money. And so can you afford not to take it? Can you afford to say no to this and lose out on these millions of dollars?” And, I mean, every day with Moses is like Indecent Proposal with Robert Redford and Demi Moore basically. “Can you afford not to do this with me? I don’t know if you can. I’m offering you a million dollars for one night. Look, if that’s fine with you to not get that million dollars, that’s okay.” And it’s like he’s saying that to every borough president constantly. But instead of one night of carnal desire, it’s generations of having a highway built over your neighborhood.

ROMAN MARS: So, this is sort of how he has taken this old-fashioned thing of just giving money to people–holding money as a controlling factor. And even though Moses can sort of present himself as above the board using the institutions that are the way that they’re supposed to be used, he can kind of exact the same ends as some kind of mob boss in the politics of 50 years before. Is pretty much the same thing. And this is kind of what this chapter is all about. It’s really fascinating. And it just reminds you that Moses is just a sui generis figure in the world. He can stay clean, prop up all these institutions, hold this public perception of him, have so much control, be such a bully in so many different ways, and have none of it stick because he has set up the laws and the institutions all around him to make him just the most powerful figure. I mean, The Power Broker, I guess, is what you maybe call him.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Maybe call him that. I mean, it’s what he finally gets called at the end of this chapter. At the end, Caro dubs him The Supreme Power Broker. And it feels like when you’re watching a movie and they say the title of the movie in the movie. And you’re like, “Ah, they got there. They did it well.”

ROMAN MARS: “I feel like you’re the captain of America right now.”

ELLIOTT KALAN: “Yeah, we really did get caught up in some star wars today.” Yeah, it’s a great– I mean, they say, “Welcome to Jurassic Park.” That makes sense. In context, it makes sense. It would make sense that he would say welcome to his park that he made for people. But other movies–it doesn’t quite work. So, I’m going to try to be Caro and be probing. And I think that’s Moses’ strength, too. I think ultimately when you get to it, Moses’ ultimate strength is that he can see beneath the surface of things to how they really operate underneath. He kind of knows how to do the research to find that out. Caro says that academics studying the working of the New York City government at this time–they didn’t really see what was actually happening. They thought the Board of Estimates still held this power. And they couldn’t see that it was all a facade. And Caro says that the proof is in the way that Robert Moses stops showing up for Board of Estimate meetings when they call him. He doesn’t explain his plans before they go up for a vote. If the person in the power position is the one that is not showing up for meetings… The person who says, “Hey, can you come explain this to me?” That person is not in power. The person who goes, “No, I’m not going to. Vote on it anyway.” That’s the person with power. And so, he has upended basically the whole system of this city in that way. He is not responsible to the public. Voters have no ability to affect him because he has this alliance of money, banks, unions, businesses, political bosses, fear– He has made essentially his own process that exists slightly outside of the democratic process. And it seems like maybe his most amazing genius insight is “I don’t have to corrupt the democratic process the way the Tammany bosses used to. I can replace it. I can replace it with something different that operates off to the side, is centralized around me, just doesn’t need to deal with these people, and when it does deal with ordinary New Yorkers, treats them as obstacles or inconveniences.”

And Robert Caro would never make this comparison. I think it’s probably outside of his frame of reference. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll have to ask him when we talk to him next, but Moses is feeling very much like Cthulhu at this point–a kind of Lovecraftian, elder god who has his own plans and does not even notice the people that he’s crushing beneath his feet as he reaches out to the cosmos to exert his madness to far-off, distant worlds. If this was the end of Moses’ story, he would’ve reached the apex of untouchable power. And he’s taken these things. And he has totally, like we’re saying, not subverted the democratic process but removed himself from it. He’s escaped from it. And as a result, he is shaping the city physically. He’s reshaping its institutions–how it operates. He is, again… I’m going to do it one more time. This is my last time making a modern day parallel. I apologize. He’s kind of doing to New York, in a way, what Donald Trump seems to want to do with the United States in making it not a system of elections and checks but instead a system that uses raw power to respond to the desires of one person and the plans of one person. And it’s very chilling. It’s a very chilling thing. And it’s very scary to think about, even knowing this is many, many decades ago. But knowing that this potential still lies at the heart of American democracy, that it’s not ironclad, and that it relies on the people who are operating it to operate it, at the very least, with an acceptance of the basic premises of democracy– If there’s someone who comes in who does not accept those basic premises–who thinks that a system where Ivy League graduates just draw roads straight through maps and then dig them through neighborhoods and don’t listen to anybody–if that person has access to the levers of the machine, then it can get really scary. And at this point, it makes me glad that Robert Moses–this sounds strange–was so into roads and so into building things as opposed to any number of more terrible things that he might’ve been doing.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. And when I think about this whole system that he shored up and sort of exploited to do what he wanted… When people talk a little bit about, like, “Ah, it’d be so great if there was just a Moses type who could get things done but get things done the way I want to,” there’s a couple reasons why there aren’t anymore. One is the lesson of Robert Moses and people like him: we built in new safety guardrails to stop them.

ELLIOTT KALAN: There’s no city construction coordinator in New York, as far as I can tell, these days.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, exactly. And the second is he put himself as the controller of all these levers. So, you just imagine him in the center of this NASA-style– Pushing buttons, pulling levers, and making everything happen… He constructed this, in a way, to work the way he wanted it to work. But all those bureaucracies and all those things built up actually slowed things down. When somebody wasn’t at the center, like him, controlling everything, it actually broke down a lot. He created the situation to make it so that no one could make things the way he did not just because we’re stopping the Moses from happening but because no one can control it the way he did. So now all these things have roadblocks. You have a board of estimates who can say no but can’t say yes. You just have all the dysfunction that’s created when it isn’t working together as an orchestra. It’s a bunch of errant notes and squeaks and bad timing. There’s no conductor at the center of it. And it made everything worse afterward.

He broke down systems. Again, I don’t want to go back to… We had this sort of discussion with Jamelle Bouie. I don’t really want to go back to the days of turkeys and patronage exactly. But he really eliminated the responsiveness of local government to its constituents. He built and sort of fostered so many sort of structures that got in the way of that that something was lost–some kind of way to get stuff done that represents the will of the people and moving something through in a quick and in a way that made sense. Even when everyone agrees, it’s very, very hard because of these systems. He broke so many things. He didn’t just build roads that destroyed neighborhoods. He broke down systems that, I don’t think, never really recovered in a lot of ways in New York.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And it means that New York is a difficult city to do things. And that’s why people do call sometimes for, “We need a Moses-like figure,” because if the systems are operating the way they’re supposed to, you don’t need a Moses-like figure. But he helped. I guess there’s this kind of pendulum swing in American government between centralization and decentralization that kind of goes back and forth and usually ends up more in the central. If you look at American history, things usually centralized more than they decentralized because it’s hard to take power away from powerful people once they’ve got it. But this is kind of, like, ultra-centralization in one person of this particular– Also, I don’t want to fall into the trap of thinking that every single thing in New York had to go through Robert Moses. But every single thing involving construction, transit, and transportation, which are major parts of the city– But he’s not the curator of cauliflowers anymore. He’s not making sure that the tickets are going out to the right people. But yeah, if you build a system around a person and that person goes away–the system–it can’t hold with a blank at its center. And you can’t necessarily just pop somebody else in there and expect them to do the job properly. It’s the thing you see in, to be honest, late-night talk shows often, where there’s a beloved talk show host and they retire and a new person gets put in and people are like, “The show is not quite the same. It doesn’t quite work the same way.” It’s like, “Yeah, because the show is built around the host.” And if you change it, you have to change the machine around it. And it’s a similar thing with city construction coordinators–the late-night talk show hosts of the New York political world.

ROMAN MARS: Totally. And I guess my point is that it isn’t so much or isn’t just that Robert Moses destroyed or led to the fall of New York, as in the title, because of his ambitions and because of the things he wanted to get done. The method which he got things done broke down systems that no one could quite put together again to get things done ever again quite the same way. And that’s another lasting effect of Moses.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I don’t know, though, Roman. In the next chapter, we’ll see maybe a string of dynamic mayors–dynamic, really exciting, really pioneering mayors–who will be able to do it. Maybe that’s what we’ll get in the next chapter. I guess there’s only one way to find out.

ROMAN MARS: We’re going to cover Chapter 34: Moses and the Mayors after this…

[AD BREAK]

So, we’re back with Chapter 34: Moses and the Mayors. And if you want to get out of the timeline when it comes to this biography, this chapter really gets out of the timeline because he’s going to go through these mini-biographies and abject lessons for each of the three mayors that succeed La Guardia in this section.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes, it could be called Moses and the Mayors That Didn’t Deserve Their Own Chapters. It’s kind of like mini-biographies–mini-histories–of these three post-La Guardia mayors. And let’s dive into ’em. And this chapter is divided up into subsections with the mayor’s name as the heading of each. And it’s the first time we see this in the book. I think it might be the only time. And there’s something about it that’s kind of jarring, but there’s also something kind of exciting about it. Caro’s like, “Yeah, I’ll structure this book the way I want to. This is the way it makes sense for this chapter. I don’t need to be beholden to just that none of the other chapters had subheadings.”

ROMAN MARS: It’s actually pretty crazy because when you’re editing things–I edit a lot of stories for 99% Invisible–there’s often this idea that you need a kind of consistency across an episode or maybe a couple of episodes on how you do and format things. And 800 pages in, he’s just like, “Fuck it. Subheads with mayor names.” I mean, I’m sure he cared. I’m sure he was super thoughtful about it.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I’m sure he and Robert Gottlieb probably had discussions or arguments about this for weeks! That’s my guess.

ROMAN MARS: I kind of love the fact that it isn’t a style used in any other part. It just goes to show you that when it comes to most things–when it comes to editing most things–to me, solving the immediate problem of clarity is, like, 95% of what you need to do. And that sort of little bit of just like, “Yeah, but what if there aren’t subheadings and other sections?” The audience does not care. They just don’t care. If it’s working, it’s working. Anyway–

ELLIOTT KALAN: And it also means we don’t have to have three full chapters on each– I mean, it’s still a long chapter. It’s still a 51-page chapter. But it means that Caro doesn’t have to worry about writing intros and outros for individual mayors, which is great. Save that energy. You just used up a lot of energy with that last chapter. Save it up for more stuff. So, it’s a marathon. It’s not a sprint, Robert Caro. We know that. So, we start with O’Dwyer. So, when we last left the chronological timeline, O’Dwyer had just been elected. He’s the Tammany Democrat. He’s this charismatic Irishman. He started out as just an immigrant laborer and worked his way up to being mayor of New York. How did he do it? Two ways, Roman: hard work and shadowy connections to organized crime. And they seem to have played equal roles in this. And O’Dwyer–you can tell when Caro is kind of affectionate towards some of the subjects and also when you talked to him in person. You can tell he talked to O’Dwyer. He went to Mexico City.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, hiding in Mexico City. Yeah.

ELLIOTT KALAN: We’ll get into why the Mayor of New York lives in Mexico City at the end of his life. But you can tell that he kind of admires the hardworking, immigrant part of O’Dwyer. And O’Dwyer clearly loves New York. He wants to be a good mayor, but New York needs massive investments in its basic infrastructure. Schools, subways, hospitals, sewers, airports–they all suck. They’re all in bad shape. And it’s going to take about one and a half billion dollars. Again, this is in 1946. So, one and a half billion dollars was a lot of money back then–not like now, when it’s not that much money. And O’Dwyer– I’m joking; of course, it’s still an astronomical amount of money.

ROMAN MARS: Just as a little bit of an aside, you know that chapter that I love that’s about the $109 million he has to raise to do the entire West Side improvement?

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah.

ROMAN MARS: I think about that. $109 million to change the face of the entire West Side of the island of Manhattan is just mind-boggling to me. Anyway, that’s the number that sticks in my head the most because it seems so low for that much stuff.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes, it would be an enormous deal.

ROMAN MARS: I mean, I think it would be, like, a trillion dollars today or something like that–craziness.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It would be impossibly expensive at this point. It’s amazing. It’s why it would’ve been better if a lot of this stuff, in terms of subway lines, had happened then because they’re now so incredibly expensive. So, O’Dwyer needs one and a half billion dollars for this construction program. He goes, “Okay, how much money does the city have?” And they go, “None.”

ROMAN MARS: “Zero.”

ELLIOTT KALAN: Actually, worse than zero because everything’s running at a deficit–hundreds of millions dollars a year in just paying off old bills. And Moses, like an angel or a devil on his shoulder, shows up to answer the mayor’s prayers–a rhyming phrase that Caro does not use but I’m introducing–with a plan to fund city construction projects. He’s like, “Look, hey, all you have to do is– Idlewild Airport?” Which is now JFK Airport. “Idlewild Airport? It needs a lot of work. Just turn it over to a public authority and then raise toll revenues by increasing the price of the subway fair 100% from a nickel to a dime. And look, you could just put it under my control and do all this stuff. We’ll take care of it. Look, public housing? We can build that affordably. Just get rid of the other guys doing it. Put me in charge. Cut down on frills, like closet doors and toilet bowl covers. As long as you cut down on those expensive luxuries, then we can do it. And you know what would give the city extra borrowing power? Raise the sales tax and the utilities taxes.” And he also says, “Give me the authority to negotiate on behalf of the city with Albany. I’ll get it done. I’ll tell you which projects can be deferred. Guess what? Schools? Libraries? Hospitals? Firehouses? We can defer those. You know what kind of projects we can’t defer? Highways. We need to build those now.” And his plan, Caro points out, is codifying Moses’ personal beliefs about who is worth taking care of and who is not. By raising subway fares and utility taxes, you are putting the tax burden on the lower classes. By not raising real estate taxes, you are lifting the tax burden on the upper classes. By building roads, you are creating services for the people who can afford cars. By not investing in the subway, you are removing services or you are degrading services for people who cannot afford cars. He’s effectively asking the city’s poor to subsidize improvements for the city’s rich and upper middle class. But it’s all really to help his stuff. He goes, “If the subway is self-sustaining–something it’s never been before…” And ever since then it’s been trying to be–the same way that they always want the post office to be self-sustaining. And it’s like, “It’s just good that you can mail something and it goes anywhere.” But anyway, it’s a public service. He says, “If the subway is self-sustaining, then the city’s debt-borrowing limit basically adds $425 million, which was going to the subway and now it doesn’t have to. I could really use $425 million to build some new roads and some new bridges and things like that. I would really like that.” And as a result, the subway system does not become self-sustaining and does not get modernized the way it needs to. And New York has been paying for that shift in priorities for at least the last three decades. Certainly the entire time I lived in New York City, subway closures, shutdowns, and slowdowns were an enormous problem. And just the fact that when you’re waiting on a platform in this New York City subway, it feels like you are inside of an oven. It feels like you’re in the story of… What? Rack Shack and– The three guys in the Bible who get thrown in a bowl that’s in an oven that gets lit on fire. That’s what it feels like to be in the subways in the summer. It’s terrible.

ROMAN MARS: I mean, this is so galling–not only just the list of villainous deeds that Robert Moses was a part of–that the fact that every ounce of it was paid for by the people with the least amount of money. It is the part that makes it so infuriating. I mean, it just is gross. I just hate it. It just makes me so mad.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It is the opposite of the way a reasonable society should work–in my opinion–that people who have less should receive more help and the people who have more should give more help. You know what? Call me a communist. I’m not, but you can call me that. I don’t care. But don’t really call me that. Robert Moses will get me in trouble for it.

ROMAN MARS: But certainly even if it’s sort of just whatever… There is no progressivity or regressivity. If it’s just equal, that would be an improvement over the degree of aggressiveness when it comes to this form of taking money from people to have roads to go through Manhattan. It takes it from the people of Manhattan that are just trying to get to work. It’s really, really upsetting how tilted it is towards the people who don’t need it.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And understandably, liberal reformers don’t like this plan. Even not-quite-dead-yet Mayor LaGuardia and the current city comptroller–they point out, “Hey, the city has overpaid tax payments to the state by over half a billion dollars. Why don’t they send that back to us and we’ll use it for construction?” And democratic legislators are like, “Yeah, we would rather not run for reelection on a tax increase and a fare increase. We’re not crazy about this plan.” And Moses’ response–he’s got a simple response. He threatens to reveal embarrassing information about the party leadership and they whip the party in line and they get behind Moses. And the city comptroller can say whatever he wants. He does not have the influence in Albany–in the state capital–that Moses has. And O’Dwyer, in the telling of this chapter, seems to be entirely absent in any of the negotiations between the city and the state. Moses is the only go-between. He misrepresents each side’s position. He lies to the public about it. O’Dwyer–I don’t know what he’s doing at this point. I mean, being mayor is a busy job. There’s other stuff. But he brokers this deal that they’re going to raise the fares and they’re going to raise taxes. Moses–in exchange–he gets all this new money to play with. He gets control of the airport authority. He gets even more bond issuing power. He finally gets to take over the tunnel authority completely. And the legislature won’t let him become chairman of the City Housing Authority, but they reorganize it in a way that he still basically has control of it. And the state–even they go, “Okay, we’ll give you the funds for your Jones Beach Marine Theater that you want to build so badly–this theater on Jones Beach.” And in the next episode, we’ll talk some more about Moses’ use of theaters and misuse of theaters.

What did the state get out of this deal? Governor Dewey–he gets to hold onto the city’s surplus tax money, which means he can cut state taxes. He can run on that. What does Mayor O’Dwyer get? He gets big construction projects he can point to when he runs for reelection in three years. What does the city get? It gets tax increases. It gets fare increases. What do the democratic legislators get? They get kicked out in the next election because they get blamed for all that. And Moses gets power. He gets so much power. And O’Dwyer is relying on him to basically recommend people to staff these different authorities. The Airport Authority Committee–O’Dwyer doesn’t even know who Moses picked until Moses sends them to the mayor’s office to be sworn in. And then O’Dwyer never speaks to them. He just swears them in and never talks to them ever again. And Moses gets named chairman of the Mayor’s Emergency Committee on Housing. He now holds nine city and state posts, and he has the power to pick the other committee members. So, he just has so much power. He’s a real– I mean, the last chapter said it. He’s a supreme power broker. He’s got all the power; he can broker it. And this is when Caro refers to “the hand of Bob,” which I think is a very funny phrase for him to use. But it makes him sound like Bob, the evil spirit from Twin Peaks–that he has possessed Mayor O’Dwyer and is making him do these terrible things.

And now, there’s a kind of back-and-forth here where O’Dwyer and Moses have a little bit of a petty thing. Moses is so confident that he starts talking openly about how much power he has over the mayor. The mayor gets mad. They have these kind of petty power games where they kind of nibble away each other’s stuff in petty ways. And O’Dwyer is starting to recognize that all these big problems that Moses said he would address are not actually getting solved. Moses is like, “There’s a housing crisis in the city. There’s all these returning veterans. We need apartments for them. You know what we should do? Tear down tens of thousands of apartments to build expressways.” And O’Dwyer was like, “Oh, well, that doesn’t really seem to be solving the housing problem. We’re tearing down housing because we needed more housing.” Moses had this kind of plan for the bonds for the airports to modernize the airports, which was that he would sell them to banks at a very highly inflated interest rate–just so generous that they have to buy them. And to pay off those bonds, he has to raise the rental fees for airlines 600%. And the airlines are like, “We’ll just go to Newark. We don’t need to pay that. We’ll go somewhere else.” And O’Dwyer gets pissed, and he takes Idlewild and LaGuardia airports away from Moses and gives ’em to the Port Authority, which is the lesser of two evils very much. And this is when O’Dwyer, as a final “Moses, I’m not happy with you,” gives the Department of the Interior the okay to take over Fort Clinton, saving it from being teared down after that decades-long crusade. So, there’s this back-and-forth. Moses tries his resignation threat, and O’Dwyer says to the messenger who brings it, “Tell the gentleman who sent this that if he wants me to accept it, just send it back again.” And Moses doesn’t, but it’s like, “O’Dwyer. Put it back on. Come on. You had it. You had the moment.”

ROMAN MARS: You were so close. You were so close.

ELLIOTT KALAN: But he can’t fully do it because there’s a power that Moses still has. It’s the power that we’re going to mention so many times that O’Dwyer does not have. We talked about it at the beginning of this chapter. He has money. If O’Dwyer wants to run for reelection, which–as we’ll see–turns out to be kind of a moot point in some ways, he needs to build housing and he needs to relocate people while housing is built. He doesn’t have the money to do that. Moses can get the money to do that. And Robert Caro says, “I can’t say that Robert Moses used his influence with state officials to force O’Dwyer to get Moses involved in housing.” But he does lay out that, in 1946, O’Dwyer brings Moses to a secret meeting with state housing officials, in which the state agrees to pay the full cost of this big, temporary relocation project so they can build new housing. And the statement announcing those funds says it is accepted on behalf of the city by Robert Moses and Mayor William O’Dwyer in that order with Robert Moses’ name first. So, I mean, the dots are there; we can connect them or not. And Moses plays this game with the mayor that he plays with everybody. If you’re doing what I want, the Triborough money faucet gets turned on. If you don’t do what I want, it gets turned off. And this leads to this plan of Moses that O’Dwyer becomes so excited about that is perhaps the craziest plan that Robert Moses has for any of his projects. Now, taking Battery Park and turning it into essentially an on-ramp for a highway that goes over across the water between lower Manhattan and Brooklyn–that’s a crazy plan. That’s pretty crazy. But Roman, can you think of an even crazier place to build an expressway?

ROMAN MARS: Well, there’s through Midtown Manhattan and through Lower Manhattan.

ELLIOTT KALAN: That’s right. Now, Midtown Manhattan and Lower Manhattan are pretty dense areas. Lower Manhattan–the buildings are smaller and shorter. Midtown Manhattan? That’s where–say–the Empire State Building is located. So, you couldn’t possibly run an expressway through the Empire State Building, would you?

ROMAN MARS: Well, you know what? If you draw it nice enough, you kind of can.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I think we mentioned earlier in the episode that, in the picture section of this book, there is an artist rendering of this Midtown Manhattan expressway that goes through buildings. And it looks so cool, but it takes you a couple minutes to be like, “This would be terrible. It would be terrible for the people in the buildings, the people on the ground, and the people in the cars.” But Moses proposes these three expressways that just cut across Manhattan Island. Upper Manhattan Expressway at 125th Street. Lower Manhattan Expressway across Broom Street. Mid-Manhattan Elevated Expressway that would cross in the mid 30s. It would go through buildings–potentially through the seventh floor of the Empire State Building. Think about that also. It’s going through the Empire State Building at the seventh floor. That’s enormously high in the air. Imagine if something fell out of a car driving above 30th Street. It’s nuts. But Mayor O’Dwyer hears about this elevated expressway, and he loves it. It really captures his imagination. He’s like, “We got to do this.” But Moses–just to get his goat because he is mad at him–goes, “Eh, we’re going to build a Lower Manhattan Expressway first. And O’Dwyer retaliates by having the Board of Estimate take a bunch of money from the road budget and putting it towards schools. So, Moses retaliates by saying he’s not going to build these parking garages that the city wants. The two of them–they’re at each other’s throats. It’s going to take some kind of dream, miracle project to get them working back together again. But how likely is it? How likely that a dream, miracle project–something that a mayor could really point to as a lasting legacy–could actually come around at this period right after World War II, when the nations of the world are attempting to unite. Caro goes into this story–what he calls “Moses’ most effective use of the power of money,” which is getting the United Nations headquarters in New York City– Okay. It seems obvious to me, as someone whose life has centered around New York for most of it, that the United Nations would be in New York City. It is the greatest city in the world. What other options are there? But in January, 1947, New York is in not in amazing shape. I feel like that’s the story of New York–it’s often not in amazing shape.

ROMAN MARS: It’s always broke.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Despite being the greatest city in the world. And O’Dwyer wants the UN in New York so badly to finally cement its status as the capital of the world. But other cities want it, too. And they have actual money to spend on it–cities that seem like dark horse candidates perhaps. But maybe they’ll have it. Philadelphia is ready to pull the trigger on giving them land and money. The UN is ready to do it. And O’Dwyer is like, “Moses, you’ve got to be the chair of this committee to land this United Nations deal.” And they put together this group of Moses loyalists–wealthy financiers–a young Nelson Rockefeller, who we’ll talk about in much greater detail later on. And Moses is like, “There’s all this land left over from the ’39 World’s Fair. Let’s stick them over there in Queens.” And the UN is like, “Uh, excuse me. We want Manhattan. This is the United Nations. We are not going to an outer borough. Thank you. We want to be in Manhattan. We want lots of parking. We want housing for our staff.”

ROMAN MARS: Housing for everybody, which is really thousands of people.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Because the UN is… I don’t know if you’ve ever driven by it. It is enormous. It’s an enormous building. It’s huge. The fact that it just looks like a Nintendo cartridge stuck into the ground of Manhattan doesn’t change the fact that it’s huge. And they want all this stuff. And New York’s like, “We can’t even afford to paint our schools uniformly. Like, can we build housing for thousands of foreign diplomat workers?” But the mayor wants it so badly. Unfortunately, December 6th, 1947, the mayor gets a phone call. The UN on Wednesday is going to vote to put the UN in Philadelphia. This is, like, Friday. That same Friday, he gets another call. Real estate mogul William Zeckendorf–someone we have never mentioned in the show before… After this episode, we’ll never mention him again. Don’t worry about it. He says to the mayor, “For months, I’ve been secretly buying up land in Turtle Bay–this area of New York in the east 40s. And I’ve got an option on 17 more acres in the area. That’s a lot of land. I was going to build apartment complexes, but you know what? I’m an old, rich man. What if I just sell it to the city?” And O’Dwyer is like, “Oh, if only! We have no money.” So, who’s going to step in? There’s only one guy who gets things done. That’s right. Robert Moses. It’s like a movie trailer. He has 96 hours to put together the financing and the legal acquisition and plans for taking this land and building the United Nations on it. 96 hours. He’s got the weekend. It’s a four-day weekend that he’s basically got to do all this. He gets some financing from John D. Rockefeller. The Rockefellers are going to cause him trouble later. But now they’re helping him out. He puts together all the plans for the acquisitions–all the details of a major public land project. He’s doing it almost from memory. He knows what he’s doing so much. And it all has to be done secretly so no one can screw it up because it is so delicate. And there’s a great paragraph about this that I’m going to take the time to read just because I love how much had to be crammed into this. “But in 96 hours, it was done. For every snag that arose, Moses had a knife. Teams of lawyers prepared to research for days the details of city surrender of East River bulkheads. Moses called in a secretary and dictated on the spot without reference to a single law book–a memorandum setting out the method–a memorandum lawyers later found to be correct down to the last comma. Legislative permission was needed for the city to close certain streets within the site and give the UNO the land. A few phone calls from Moses to Albany secured a guarantee of the permission. Late Tuesday night, about 12 hours before the headquarters committee convened, Zeckendorf, who had taken no part in the discussions following his offer and did not know if there’s any chance of its being accepted, was celebrating his birthday in a private dining room at the Monte Carlo when Wallace K. Harrison, the distinguished architect and intimate of the Rockefeller family, walked in with a block-by-block map of the site bulging out of a jacket pocket, sat down at the table, tried to assume an heir of nonchalance, failed, and blurted out, “Would you sell it for eight and a half million?”

I love that detail so much. He’s trying to be smooth as he walks into a wealthy man’s birthday party. But he just is like, “Will you sell it for this much?” And they do it. They get it all done. And local reformers are like, “This is money the city should be spending on our own residents and not on the United Nations.” And the UN wants essentially tax-free land. And the taxes from that real estate would’ve paid so much money into the city. Over the next 10 years, Caro or whichever source he’s using estimates that it costs the city more than $32 million. But the mayor and the other people in power–they’re dazzled by the idea of being the permanent capital of the world. And I just want to step in. This is not Robert Caro saying this. This is me saying this. Do you really believe the United Nations is going to base itself in Philadelphia? Are you kidding me? No offense to Philly. I have friends that live in Philly. It’s a great city. I love going there. It’s got a great modern art museum with the world’s greatest collection of Marcel Duchamp’s work, which is one of my favorite artists. Let’s be realistic. Philadelphia? Come on. Seriously? Are you kidding?

ROMAN MARS: You know what? But it could be San Francisco. It totally could be.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It could have been. I could see it in San Francisco.

ROMAN MARS: I could see it in San Francisco. Mainly because of Star Trek, I can maybe see it in San Francisco. I mean, it’s the center of the fucking galaxy in Star Trek!

ELLIOTT KALAN: That’s true. Having the federation headquarters there, it really does outclass the UN. That’s true. And I could see the UN being in San Francisco. There’s something about… There’s certain cities in the United States that feel like world cities and others that don’t necessarily. And maybe that’s me being unfair. Maybe it’s just years of them not getting their chance. But I feel like the city that is best symbolized by Rocky is not necessarily the city that the United Nations is going to go in.

ROMAN MARS: We’re going to get letters. We’re going to get letters.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Now, I feel like I’m just ragging on Philadelphia. But the idea is like, “We’ve got this amazing modern art museum.” You know what it’s best known for? A boxer in a movie ran up the steps while he was exercising. So, it’s hard to believe a world where… It’s hard to believe a world– I’m going to keep talking while Roman catches his breath. It’s hard to believe a world where New York doesn’t have the United Nations because we’ve lived in it for so long. It’s been there for almost 80 years now. But it very easily could not have happened. And it’s this whirlwind, 96-hour sprint. This was a sprint. This was not a marathon. This was a 96-hour sprint to get it done. And by this point, Moses can kind of do no wrong with O’Dwyer. In July, 1946, they are bitter enemies. January, 1947, Moses is O’Dwyer’s hero. He will listen to whatever Moses tells him. He will do pretty much whatever he wants. Twice a week, they have breakfast together–these long breakfast meetings. And the mayor–he’ll just sign usually whatever papers Moses brings him. Moses brings a document to sign, he will sign it because Moses pulled off this amazing coup.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, it’s really remarkable–whenever you do a project with someone–how you get so close to them. You can tell that that just really works. And he just capitulates to everything Moses wants at that point. It’s really something else.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It helps that O’Dwyer is overwhelmed by running this city. There’s something very touching about this and the next mayor, Impellitteri, that we’ve been kind of seeing this parade of titans throughout the book. There’s Robert Moses, but of course there’s Al Smith and there’s La Guardia and there’s Roosevelt. And it starts to make you think, “Oh, back then, they just had giants among them who were able to take hold of a community and govern it.” But at the time, there were plenty of people who were just kind of scared by it. This is an overwhelming thing. And O’Dwyer finds real personal comfort, it seems, in Moses’s confidence and his ability. And so, he’s relying more and more on him because this is a big thing. And he talks to Caro about looking out over the sea at night and being like, “Can you imagine? Can you believe that I’m in charge of all this? That’s a frightening thing.” And Moses does not have that fear. Maybe that’s his other secret weapon. He has the lack of fear that comes with arrogance that he can do anything.

So, in December, 1948, O’Dwyer points Moses to that mayor’s committee on slum clearance. Moses has fast control over public housing–the control he couldn’t get under La Guardia. And he has even more control than he could have had before because Title I of the Federal Housing Act of 1949 finally extends the power of eminent domain to an area so that the government can condemn private land and turn it over to a private individual for public housing. And this is the kind of combination that Moses kind of used to use in his state parks in Long Island in the ’20s, but that was for public parks. Now, he can wield that power in New York City. And he can use it to broker with the people who want to do those private projects to create more housing. Moses, of course, endorses O’Dwyer for reelection. He campaigns alongside him. He ignores calls that he should run himself. He’s like, “I’m flattered. But no.” And Caro admits that O’Dwyer probably did not need Moses’ endorsement, but it doesn’t hurt that he has all these ribbon-cuttings and all these things he can point to. The United Nations is going to be headquartered in New York. That swells you with pride as a New Yorker. And Moses kind of helps him by deliberately holding off on doing too many massive relocations of tenants until after the election. So, that’s something that can’t be at O’Dwyer’s feet. There’s a section here where Caro introduces a kind of mini nemesis of Moses who comes in at the end of O’Dwyer’s run–a guy named Jerry Finkelstein. He’s this young guy. He says, “I can play O’Dwyer better than anyone else in the city. I know how to get anything I want from him usually because I know that whoever talks to O’Dwyer last gets what he wants.” So, he makes a point of just waiting until everyone else has talked to the mayor, then going in and talking to him. And there’s a funny scene where Finkelstein has been told he’s going to be the new chair of the city planning commission. Moses doesn’t like that. So, when he shows up to get sworn in, someone says, “Hey, your name’s not on the roll.” And he goes to O’Dwyer, and he is like, “I thought you’re going to make me city planning commission chair.” And he’s like, “Oh, Bob was saying maybe it should do something else or do another thing. What else do you want? I’ll give you anything else.” And Finkelstein goes, “This is all I want. This is the only job I want.” And O’Dwyer goes, “Then you shall have it,” and just signs them in right there–swears him in. And it feels like satire. But I trust Caro that it’s real. I assume it’s probably Finkelstein’s telling or someone else who was in the room.

Finkelstein becomes the champion of a concept that has reared its head before and will rear its head again here now: the idea of a master plan–a master plan for developing the city. New York has never had one. And the result is dealing with massive problems: waste, redundancy, lack of development where development needs doing, overdevelopment where the resources can’t really handle it. A master plan, in theory, would smooth all that out. And not a master plan in the Moses sense of a master planner draws lines on a map and says, “This is where things are going.” Finkelstein wants to do something that involves community leaders talking to business leaders–people getting together at a table and finding compromises in things. And it’s something that Caro– He’s had a couple of these throughout the book–these kind of idealists that he’d paint as “if only they’d had their way.” And I really wonder if it would’ve worked the way that Finkelstein wants it to. And I see a disbelieving look on Roman’s face. Roman, what do you think?

ROMAN MARS: I think it would. I mean, he’s clearly… Finkelstein is much more of a modern-day thinker when it comes to designing cities. He’s not like, “Roll out a map and draw lines across it,” like you said. The nature of this master plan is one of talking to a neighborhood. What does it need? What is it good at? How do you have these neighborhoods fulfill their specific character and their needs and how you patch those together and make it into a functional city. It is really a ground-up idea. When you hear the word “master plan,” you might think, “This is just a competing idea with Moses’ idea of a master plan.” It is not. It is really something different. Like, Finkelstein thinks differently. And it is just… In a way, it’s like… Spoiler alert–this doesn’t work out well for Finkelstein.

ELLIOTT KALAN: No. No, it doesn’t happen. If you were hoping to get a copy of the master plan and see how well New York has followed it since then, it doesn’t happen.

ROMAN MARS: But my sense of the decades that followed–maybe there isn’t a grand master plan–but the thinking behind Finkelstein’s master plan is more the modern thinking of how to run and shape cities.

ELLIOTT KALAN: His thinking seems much more in line with the kind of Jane Jacobs Death and Life of Great American Cities. A neighborhood is a living unit. You’ve got to see what the life of it is like. It needs to have a kind of mixed-use, and everyone has to get something out of their life in it that makes it worth living in it.

ROMAN MARS: He’s much more of a modern thinker that thinks about these things.

ELLIOTT KALAN: So, it’s a battle not just of “this guy’s stepping on my turf,” but a battle of ideologies.

ROMAN MARS: For sure. Yeah.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And the big fight is, in 1950, O’Dwyer announces Triborough has done a study. Guess what? Their study of the Mid-Manhattan Elevated Expressway says that the Mid-Manhattan Elevated Expressway is the best way to carry traffic across 30th Street. Wouldn’t. That’s amazing. It’s a 160-foot wide road. It would be seven stories in the air. You would have to remove all the buildings on the south side of 30th Street, which is insane to me. That’s phenomenal. Wow. It is a horrifically terrible idea. It’s right over the heart of Manhattan’s business district. And Caro has shown us elevated expressways–they kill neighborhoods. Even if you need them necessarily in a place, people do not want to live and work in a place where the sun doesn’t reach the street. Triborough though will pay most of the money for it. and trade and civic associations are like, “Did Triborough study any other plans? Maybe a tunnel might be okay.” And they want the planning commission to do its own study. And the mayor gives the planning commission permission to study it. But he’s like, “Hey. They could show me plans for a great tunnel, but no one’s offering me money to build a tunnel.So, it doesn’t matter.” But he says, “But you can have permission.” The permission is useless. They have no money to actually do the study. They have no money to implement a building project.

But just the fact that O’Dwyer gave them this useless token permission for an unfunded study angers Moses so much that Moses has Triborough kill the project entirely. “You know what? We’re not even going to do it.” So, maybe the greatest movie he ever had was killing his own terrifying project. And he has to angrily announce, “Well, now my expressway is not going to get built across 30th Street. It was going to go through the Empire State Building.” And he gives Finkelstein a tongue lashing. But the mayor still supports the idea of the master plan. And it seems like there’s some momentum behind it–there’s some movement. And again, O’Dwyer is starting to once again sour on the fact that Moses is not actually solving the problems he’s supposed to solve. It seems like the UN is behind them. O’Dwyer is preparing for a second term. Perhaps there is a turn here. Perhaps he might turn away from Moses and embrace the idea of Finkelstein’s master plan. This could be it. This could be the hinge point at which O’Dwyer becomes the hero the city needs. All he has to hope is that his mob connections and the bleak corruption of his administration don’t become public right now. Roman, is that exactly what happens?

ROMAN MARS: That is exactly what happens.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s so… I think a lot of people forget that the ’50s was a big time for investigation of organized crime. And the Senate committee on organized crime that Estes Kefauver led–they were doing hearings all over the place. They did televised hearings that were the first time that a lot of people really saw organized crime laid bare as a real– How massive the system was–how much it had stretched into American life. And so it is a bad time to be a mayor who has deep connections to organized crime. And he hastily resigns as mayor right before, I think, a massive investigation into police corruption. A friend of his goes to see Harry Truman. Harry Truman hastily appoints him as an ambassador.

ROMAN MARS: That’s amazing.

ELLIOTT KALAN: As Caro says, “And on August 31st, 1950, almost 18 years to the day after Tammany’s most popular mayor fled the country, Tammany’s second most popular mayor crossed the border into Mexico.” And that is why Robert Caro is interviewing William O’Dwyer in Mexico City.

ROMAN MARS: I love it so much.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It is such an amazing turn. And we didn’t set it up the way Caro sets it up. So, Caro really goes into detail earlier on in the chapter. He was talking about O’Dwyer’s early life–about his connections to organized crime. So, it doesn’t feel like it comes out of nowhere the same way. But Caro’s like, “There’s a reason that when O’Dwyer was asked to run for mayor, he said, ‘No, I don’t want to.'” It’s because he’s so afraid of this stuff coming out. And so he literally flees. He flees and flees to Mexico, like the gangsters in Hollywood movies of the ’30s and ’40s, and becomes ambassador to Mexico. And so the O’Dwyer era ends as suddenly as it began, you might say.

ROMAN MARS: That’s right. But that brings us to probably Elliott’s favorite character in the book.

ELLIOTT KALAN: One of them. I have to say, I have a real love of this character. I love the way that Caro talks about it. Now, Roman, have you ever read the book Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey. I don’t know how to pronounce his name.

ROMAN MARS: No.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It is one of the funniest history books of all time. This is essentially a burn book he’s writing. It was written in the 1910s, 1920s. He writes about four different eminent Victorians, and it is just a burn book. He’s just writing about what hypocrites they were. It’s like Hollywood, Babylon about Victorian England. And the writing in this section is the closest I feel like he comes in this book to that book, where it is like, “Alright, we’re talking about real history here. It is ridiculous. We’re going to have some fun with this.” And yet at the same time, he still seems to have a sweetness and affection for the man he’s writing about. That man–Vincent Impellitteri–perhaps one of the lesser known mayors of New York, which makes sense. I think Caro’s feelings about him are best showed by the fact that the chapter subheading is not Impellitteri–it is Impy, which was his nickname in the newspaper, which right off the bat miniaturizes this figure. He sounds like Mister Mxyzptlk from the Superman comics.

ROMAN MARS: That’s right. So, let’s talk about Impy when we come back.

[AD BREAK]

Okay. Impy. Lay it out for me. Tell me about Impy.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I know why you had to put a break there, but I had so much trouble sitting through the break waiting to talk about Impy. Let’s set up why he is in this position. Why is a guy who everyone calls Impy suddenly mayor of New York? By law, when the mayor retires or resigns, they have to be succeeded by the president of the city council. Who is president of the city council in 1950? An almost totally unknown–totally undistinguished–Tammany apparatchik. His highest previous job in the government was as secretary to a judge named Judge Schmuck, which… It’s one of those things where I’m like, “Caro, I’m going to have to check the notes.” That seems too perfect. And this man is Vincent Impellitteri. And according to a story that Caro says Moses attested to him is true–that Moses said he was apparently at this meeting–the machine bosses needed an Italian from Manhattan to balance the ticket.They already had an Irishman from Brooklyn and a Jew from the Bronx on their city council list. They needed an Italian from Manhattan. They literally looked at a list of city employees and saw what was the name that was so obviously Italian that anyone looking at the ballot would know this is an Italian guy. And they found the name Vincent Impellitteri, which is a very Italian name. And so, this guy–as city council president–voted however the mayor tells him to. He just attends public functions. Caro says, “Amiable but slow witted, he was a joke among political insiders. But now he was mayor, and the joke was on the city.”

And it is the kind of thing– It’s like the movie Dave, in a way. This guy who has no right to be the mayor of New York is suddenly there. So, he has to win a special election to get the full term as mayor. The Democrats are like, “We are not nominating you for a full term. This is not happening.” And he runs as the independent, anti-Tammany boss candidate. He’s like, “You don’t know much about me, but I’m anti-Tammany.” And he says to Moses, “If you endorse me, I will not reappoint Finkelstein, and you will have even more control.” And Moses is like, “Uh, check please! Yes.”

ROMAN MARS: “Speaking my language.”

ELLIOTT KALAN: “Power in exchange for me endorsing you? Yes, thank you. Did you read the book? You know what I do?” And as a result, Impy is the first ever independent candidate to become mayor. Not a fusion candidate–not a Republican Democrat–he’s an independent candidate running just on his own name, which, again, most people know as Impy because that’s what the newspaper calls him. And there’s a section here that I just love. Caro is scathing.It says, “Thanks to his PR men and his physical appearance, his addiction to the blue suit and the boutonniere, combined with his iron gray hair, deeply earnest mean, and stolidity that–during the campaign–was mistaken for dignity, made him the very model of a modern mayor. At the approach of a camera, his brow would furrow, his lips would purse, his jaw would jut, and his eyes would focus on whatever piece of paper happened to be handy, just as intently as if he understood the words written on it. Impy had run a great race. But once in possession of the prize he had won, he proved to have not the slightest idea of what to do with it.” And it talks about him being at board of estimate meetings and a problem coming up and he’s like, “Gee, I don’t know guys. Has anybody got an idea about this? Anybody got this? I got nothing.” Caro paints him as just totally naive–that he’s a very sweet kind of blockhead who barely pretends he knows what he’s doing. He’s unaware of the power that the mayor actually holds. He’s bewildered by the workings of government. He’s just–even more than O’Dwyer–looking for someone to just kind of take him by the shoulder, put him in the right direction, and lead him by the hand to the decisions. And of course, Robert Moses is happy to be that person. He has the big brother that every guy who is totally outclassed by the office of mayor really wants.

So, it was bad enough when he was going to O’Dwyers for breakfast twice a week. Now, he’s going up to Impy’s–he’s going to the mayor’s office–nearly every morning. He has a pile of papers for Impy to sign. Impy will sign them. And he has marching orders for Impy for that day. If there are jobs to fill, Moses tells him who to fill those jobs with. He tells him who desperately to not fill those jobs with also. And the main test is how loyal is this person to Robert Moses because if they’re loyal to him, they’re going to get this job. And Impy always follows Moses’ advice. He follows his tax policies. And for good measure–this is maybe the most emasculating moment–when Moses provides the mayor with a vacation house close to his own vacation house so that he will still have close control of him, even when he’s on vacation.

And Finkelstein still has a little bit of time left in his term before he inevitably does not get reappointed. He manages to finish work on the master plan for the city, but his department does not have the money to print copies of the report of the master plan.

ROMAN MARS: This is incredible.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And I know this is pre-Xerox. You have to go to a printer. He’s printing a lot of copies. It’s going to take a couple thousand dollars. Moses is like, “Mayor, don’t give him the money to print those copies.” They bury the report. Finkelstein has a nervous breakdown from all the work. He finds out, in the hospital, that he has lost his position. He’s not being reappointed. And Moses has Impy install a guy that Moses can control. And these board of estimate members who had previously supported the plan, coincidentally around the time Moses does favors for them in their boroughs, switch their votes. And so, the plan is effectively dead. And Robert Caro says, “Set aside the fact that $325,000 were spent on this plan and thus wasted because it’ll never happen.” The bigger cost is this idea of local control of areas of the city–a plan organized around the needs of local neighborhoods and a plan that was about finding consensus between people who have a real stake in what’s happening in those regions–that’s gone. The outer boroughs? They’re going to continue to be developed in this haphazard kind of irrational way, and that’s the full cost of this master plan not getting off the ground. And Finkelstein takes his place as the latest in the parade of reformers who have tried to make the city responsive to someone other than Robert Moses and who Robert Moses then makes sure does not achieve their goal.

ROMAN MARS: And puts in the hospital.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, puts him in the hospital. It’s a real notch on Moses’ gun. He’s just carving on his gun the number of performers he’s set aside. And it shows you that Finkelstein’s working hard on this. It’s a hard job to put together a master plan for a city. When you care about the people that are being affected by it, it’s hard. It’s very easy to put together a master plan when you don’t really care what happens to the people who are affected by it. Moses is this amazing thinker and this master builder, the hardest part of the equation he has decided he’s not going to deal with. It’s like, “I’m going to build an airplane. I don’t care if it gets off the ground.” “Oh, this guy built an amazing airplane. Look at it. It looks so cool. Does it fly?” Doesn’t matter. He’s a great airplane builder.

ROMAN MARS: Or doesn’t care about the passengers inside of it.

ELLIOTT KALAN: That’s true. “It’s an amazing airplane. It crashes 85% of the time, so who gets hurt? The passengers? It’s fine. The bonds on the plane–they pay off such high dividends. We can always build more. It’s great.”

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. It’s really something to watch this. And Moses has the perfect person in Impy–just someone who would just do exactly what he says.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It is Palpatine and Jar Jar Binks all over again in the Imperial Senate. Only this time, it’s in real life–in New York City–not in a fictional galaxy. And Moses, at this point, is at the height of his power. He’s not showing up to meetings. He doesn’t care. He gets whatever he wants. And Caro goes over numbers here, and he just talks about how vastly more was spent by the city on roads than everything else. He says that during the O’Dwyer administration, when Moses only had a lot of power, the city spent about $3 million on colleges, about $1.1 million on libraries, and $80 million on highways. And under Impellitteri, the numbers only go up more. The city spends $4 million on libraries, $70 million on hospitals, $137 million on schools, and $172 million on highways, which is only, Caro notes, the city’s contribution. It doesn’t count federal money going into those highways. It doesn’t count things, I assume, like the taxes that are not going to get paid on that real estate in the future. It is just astonishing that highways are the thing that so much of the city’s money is going into. And the city builds 88 miles of new highway during this time and builds no new subway miles.

ROMAN MARS: No new subway miles.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Zero!

ROMAN MARS: It’s just disgraceful.

ELLIOTT KALAN: The thing that most of the people in the city use at least twice a day–it does not get expanded at all. The schools are overcrowded. There’s 182 schools in the city that are not even fireproofed. And the public colleges, of which New York is often justifiably proud– A lot of people in New York attend New York City’s public colleges. There’s a study that points out that there are 46,000 students a year who are eligible for education there and would take it–would go to those colleges–but they can’t because there simply isn’t infrastructure. There’s no room for them in the schools. It’s just massive swaths of the city being underserved because that money’s going to highways. It feels like– I just imagine Moses is literally like Scrooge McDuck sitting in a pile of money, just throwing it up in the air and going, “Highways, highways, highways!” And someone comes by with a donor plate and is like, “Can I have five more dollars for schools?” He’s like, “No.”

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. I mean, Caro tallies this up–that during Impy’s administration, $500 million in state and federal funds went into the New York Highway and housing construction. And that was all spent by Moses. That’s where Moses wanted it. That’s where he spent it. It’s amazing for him to control that much money.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s amazing. And he’s spending it. He’s doling it out to the people who are on his team, who are doing his favors. Remember that last chapter. It’s not like he’s like, “I have $500 million, and I’m going to spend it only in the most efficient, best way possible.” It is money for his projects, and it’s money he can use to accrue more power and to maintain his power. Meanwhile, the thing that I always forget about city budgets is that when you issue bonds for construction, you’ve got to pay interest on them. And so, by 1952, the city is paying $211 million a year in debt service on the money that it borrowed to build things. Luckily, Triborough is bringing in all that toll money–that should cut that down. No, because Triborough gets to keep that money. That money doesn’t go to the city. The city is paying off the interest fees, but it’s not getting the toll money to pay it. And since it’s spending all that money just to pay off the interest on things it built, it can’t afford to maintain the things that it built. And so those roads–once Moses builds them, he puts almost no interest into maintaining them. He’s just not interested in it, it seems. And so they’re deteriorating. And Caro says that there was a “skewing of expenditures away from service functions and toward public works construction.” They’re not servicing the things the city has. They’re instead just building new stuff. And the city’s population is changing. This is the era that people talk about when it’s the beginning–the very beginnings–of movement out to the suburbs of the people who have the money to move to the suburbs. There’s more and more low-income residents in the city coming in, and they need services. They need them, and they’re not going to get ’em. And of course, all good and also sinister things must come to an end at some point.

This 40-month ideal in which Moses is the shadow mayor behind Impellitteri–it has to end at some point. But in that time, he has placed so many stakes for his projects that they cannot be undone. He’s evicted so many people. Their buildings have been destroyed. And what? Is a future mayor going to be like, “We’re going to stop this project that all these buildings were destroyed for?” No, you got to have something to make it worthwhile. You have to have something to show for it. Unsurprisingly, Impy is overwhelmingly defeated in the next Democratic primary. I feel like everyone in New York was just biding their time, waiting for the moment when they could vote for anyone other than him. And Moses has been so good at hiding his role in the administration that, even though the city is essentially rejecting him, they don’t know it. And because his jobs were unelected, even the voters rejecting his greatest puppet doesn’t mean anything to him except, “Ah shucks, I guess I’m just going to have 90% power instead of 100% power.” And years later, Moses is talking to Caro and is like, “Yeah, Impellitteri was a good mayor. He’s a good mayor. I thought he did a really good job.” And Caro goes to visit Impy, who’s working at a law firm doing kind, like, a do-nothing job. He’s kind of window dressing; they have a former mayor at this law firm. And Impy is going on and on about what a great man Moses is. They’re so close. They were so close. And Caro says, “When was the last time you saw him?” And he says– Well, actually, you know what? I was just going to summarize it, but let me just read it because there’s something bittersweet about it–this using up of Impy. He goes, “He went on for some time reminiscing about how close he and Moses had been. Then, however, he was asked when he had last seen Moses. And the sincere friendly face turned sad as he tried in vain to recall the last time he had seen the big, charming, brilliant man who had once been so friendly to him. “I haven’t seen him recently,” he said it last. And as much as Impy never should have been mayor, Caro has painted him as such a childlike figure that I feel so sad in that moment. It’s such a Charlie Brown moment for Impellitteri. So sad. Moses leaves mayors sad. That should be a slogan. “Moses leaves mayors sad.”

ROMAN MARS: He uses everybody and makes them just miserable in the end. And they’re like, “Why in the world did I get ensorcelled by this man,” except for Impy, who’s just too dimwitted to know that he was used.

ELLIOTT KALAN: You get the sense in the chapter–and I wonder if this is the case–that even though he was mayor of New York, he probably still felt so excited that someone like Moses wanted to talk to him, be close with him, and work with him. This man who’s so dynamic, who’s so smart, and who’s so amazing at these things is showing him attention. And it’s almost like he doesn’t seem to realize that it’s because he’s mayor of New York that Moses is doing this. It’s not like Moses likes him or wants to be his friend. And it’s not like Impy doesn’t have something he’s giving Moses in return. I wonder if he was as naive as Caro paints him, but there’s not a lot of biographies of Impy to crack open to get an alternate take. Maybe there is one, but I don’t know of it.

ROMAN MARS: Okay, so this last little bit of the Three Mayors chapter is Robert Wagner. If you’ll remember, the scene that starts the whole book is an interaction with Robert Wagner.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes. And we should call him Robert F. Wagner. That’s his official name because, again, there’s an actor named Robert Wagner. And we don’t want to get them mixed up.

ROMAN MARS: And he’s a junior, too, right?

ELLIOTT KALAN: That’s true. That’s the thing. He’s Robert F. Wagner Jr. because Robert F. Wagner Sr. was also a figure in New York politics. He was a state legislator, and we’ll get into it right now. Let’s just say it. So, there’s just a little bit about Robert F. Wagner, Jr. here because he’s going to play a bigger role. This end of this chapter is kind of, like, teasing us a little bit for the future. But Caro jumps back to those days we remember so well. Young Robert Moses hanging out with Al Smith, singing along at all hours of the night just as the piano was played at Al Smith’s apartment. And who’s there with them? Al Smith’s former roommate, fellow legislator, Robert F. Wagner, Sr. And who does Robert F. Wagner Sr. bring with him? His little boy, Robert F. Wagner Jr. Moses has known this mayor since this mayor was a boy. So, already there’s a power dynamic imbalance right there because it’s hard to know somebody as a child and not always see that child in them. But Robert F. Wagner Jr. decides to go into his dad’s business; he goes into politics. And his first race for a district office–Moses does him a favor. Moses arranges for him to promise the building of a swimming pool. And then, I guess, when he’s in office, Moses builds that pool. And so he has bolstered him. And so they have a relationship. Wagner has, I guess, made the mistake early on of letting Moses do something for him.

But the relationship sours because, as Wagner rises, he becomes Manhattan borough president and supports the master plan. And when Moses says, “Hey, hire this guy,” he goes, “Eh, I’m going to hire this other person that I like rather than your person.” And Wagner has a habit. He does not bad mouth anybody. He doesn’t like to say a bad thing about anybody, but people around him get the feeling he does not like Robert Moses. And he runs for mayor. He runs against Moses’ preferred candidate, Impy–the perfect type of mayor–essentially an empty suit. And he says, “I’m going to stand up to Moses after the election.” And I wonder if there’s a reversal that Moses sees Wagner as someone– He’s known him since he was a boy. But Wagner is also like, “I’ve known you since my whole life.” Maybe he’s not as afraid of him because he remembers back when he was just a guy singing along with Governor Al Smith late at night to a piano.

And so, we get to this scene–back to where we started. As you said in the introduction, Wagner is coming in. People say to him, “Don’t renew Moses’ membership on the planning commission.” Surely the creators of this government did not intend for somebody to propose a project in one job and then approve it in another job. It seems–at the very least–anti-democratic and maybe a little foolish for someone to be in charge and be their own boss in that way. And it leads us to that scene. Wagner tries to do it subtly. He just does not include that as one of the posts that he is signing Moses in for. But Moses realizes it. If he thought Moses just wasn’t going to notice till later, he was mistaken. Moses goes into Wagner. And Wagner’s like, “Oh, I guess we got to get the paperwork ready.” And Moses goes out, fills out the paperwork himself, hands it to him, and he says, “I will resign from all of my posts if you don’t sign this.” Or at least that’s what Moses told people close to him because Caro says, “By the point he wanted to ask Moses about this, Moses had already cut off all contact with him.” And when Caro talks to Wagner, Wagner kind of tiptoes around it and doesn’t want to fully admit that he fell for the resignation threat. We’ve come full circle. It’s that scene again. We’re there!

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. In editorial circles, it is known as an e-shape structure, which is, like, you tease a little bit of something that happens later on. I mean, this is a very big “e.”

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s a huge– It’s an enormous “e.” That’s true.

ROMAN MARS: But you tease something in the future that’s a significant moment. And then eventually you circle back to it, and you see it again. And then the rest of the book–the following 500 pages–is the tail end of the “e” coming.

ELLIOTT KALAN: This is a lowercase “e” you’re talking about.

ROMAN MARS: t. Exactly. It’s a lowercase “e.”

ELLIOTT KALAN: Because an uppercase “E” would be more like you’d make a turn, you turn, it’s a dead end, then you have to keep going the rest of the way.

ROMAN MARS: It’s a lowercase “e.” Yeah.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I’ve never heard about that. I mean, that’s a perfect way to describe it. That’s great. We are now in– It also means we are in unstable ground at this point. We don’t know what happens after this scene.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, this is what we’ve been prepared for. It’s the man who can stand up to the mayor and just hand him a blank piece of paper, fill it out really fast, and just say, “Sign it,” and have him get his way. After this moment, we’re in uncharted territory when it comes to Moses and his power, which is a great moment–Super exciting.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Caro’s so good at stuff. Anyway, so Wagner’s aid–Warren Moscow–he goes, “You should do something dramatic on housing.” And he puts together this big housing development plan, and Moscow thinks he’s doing the smart thing. He makes sure to get Moses’ approval. And Moses is like, “Yeah, it’s a good plan. Yeah, we should do this.” Moscow then does the dumb thing. He presents the plan to the board of estimates rather than letting Moses do it. And Moses throws a fit, and he tells Wagner, “You got to kill that plan. Kill it!” And then once the plan is dead, Moses submits pretty much the same plan but with his name on it, and it flies through the approval process. Moses–at this point–what I like about it is it’s more symmetry where he has become the thing that politicians want to be that he uses against them. He wants to have his name on this thing, and that’s important to him.

ROMAN MARS: That’s right. That’s right. Another thing that happens here is, even though he’s in shakier territory with Wagner, he’s been in power for so long that anyone qualified to do anything–anyone whose opinion you would respect to say, “Maybe Moses isn’t right about this,” is somebody that Moses hired 20 years ago and trained. And nobody qualified in the city to offer a counterargument. They all have some association with Moses. He probably hired them at some point and trained him to think the way he does. So, he’s insulated. The new people may come and go, but by this point the sort of ecosystem around him is just kind of versions of Moses men. You know what I mean? They’re not his inner circle, but there’s some form of progeny that has grown up in the Moses world. So, he’s really buffeted by all this support. And so, Wagner can complain all he wants to in some ways, but he can turn to no one who would disagree with Moses about almost anything.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes. And these are jobs that require a high level of education and skill and experience. So, it’s not like you could just get someone else to– You can’t clean house. Who would you find? And Moscow says that some of Moses’ power “stems simply from the fact that his enterprises developed people.” Like you’re saying, they develop people in the Moses way of thinking, which makes me think about Moses– I know I’ve compared Bob Moses in this episode already to Cthulhu and Bob from Twin Peaks–

ROMAN MARS: An octopus that throws fish.

ELLIOTT KALAN: That one didn’t quite work yet. Yeah, a fish-throwing octopus. That one–we could strike that from the record, your honor. This is not as sinister a comparison, but it makes me think about Robert Moses almost as like a public works Lorne Michaels. Like, a lot of Lorne Michael’s strength doesn’t come from SNL being the most amazing show on tv, but it comes from the fact that it is such an incubator of talent and those people go out and they spread that kind of comedy–and he’s been doing it for 40 years. And so, now it’s hard to find people in comedy who don’t at least have some connection to the SNL world in some way.

ROMAN MARS: Totally. There’s a sitcom with Broadway Video on the front of it as a marker just because. And you’re like, “Wow.” Yeah, and it’s because Lorne Michaels created all these people and cultivated this whole development process.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And it shows how much you can get through the cultivation of people, through staffing power, and through bringing people up through the ranks. Power is not just about corruption and graft, it’s also about developing and encouraging people to think the way that you think and also give them the opportunities that they feel that loyalty to you and they agree with you on things. And Moses is really good at that. And it’s not until 1958, when Wagner just fully reorganizes the Housing Authority, that Moses loses his control over it. That’s after 13 years of domination. And even if he doesn’t fully control it, he still maintains power over its funding, its relationship to the state, the slum clearance work, transportation through it, and parks in it. I don’t know if you’ve ever had gophers in your yard. It’s hard to get rid of ’em. They don’t go away. There’s always more. You fill in one hole, and another hole opens up. This is a real-life problem that I’ve had to deal with and it’s very frustrating. And that’s Moses. He’s everywhere. You stop up one thing, and there’s all these other places that he pops up. And he doesn’t have the automatic power that he had under Impy, but he still usually gets what he wants. For all of Wagner’s “I’m going to stand up to Moses,” that standing up to him is, for the most part, kind of nibbling around the edges and not addressing the core of the power. And if he doesn’t get what he wants, he’s always got the resignation threat. Just take that out of mothballs, and he starts to use it again. And he starts to use it a lot.

Will no one save us from this turbulent city construction coordinator? Will nobody do the job of saying “I accept” to the resignation? We’re just going to have to wait to find out if Wagner is that man. Is he the one who’s finally going to do it? We’re going to have to find out in the future because that’s the end of this chapter. And this chapter had a lot of tough stuff in it–a lot of dense facts–but we’re coming up on two chapters that are very readable. The next episode–it’s going to have some chapters, one of which is just super fun, and the other one, which is just heartbreaking. We’re about to get into some very heartbreaking stuff that is some of the reason that Caro really needed to write this book. And so, I feel like this episode–we’ve been going up the top of the rollercoaster. And it’s super exciting as you’re going up. But there’s that moment when you’re about to go over the top where you’re like, “Should I get off of this thing?” I don’t know if I can handle this. And then you start heading down again, and you’re like, “Too late! I’m enjoying it again!” And I’m not going to say the next chapters are necessarily enjoyable because, like I said, some of it is heartbreaking.

ROMAN MARS: It’s a lot of tragedy, yeah.

ELLIOTT KALAN: But there’s some amazing stuff coming up in the book that I just can’t wait to talk about with you. But that’s where we leave it at this episode.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, there’s a lot more human tragedy and a lot less about banking and bonds.

ELLIOTT KALAN: That’s true. If you want to hear more about bonds, you’re going to have to look out for some other books. We kind of covered it, I think. Yeah, more about people.

ROMAN MARS: And we’ll cover that next time. But coming up, our conversation with New York City writer and influencer Shiloh Frederick about her experience reading The Power Broker as a native New Yorker and how her viral videos about the book actually made some change.

[AD BREAK]

And now our conversation with Shiloh Frederick. From when we were first planning this series, the one person I knew I wanted to have on was Shiloh because, around that time, I read an article in the New York Times about an influencer who was reading The Power Broker and was so disturbed by the passage about the iron monkey decorations in the Harlem Park that she took a little trip, recording as she went.

SHILOH FREDERICK (TIKTOK VIDEO): Today, I’m in Riverside Park, looking for something. But I hope to God I don’t find it or else my next stop will have to be the grave of Robert Moses so I could summon him so we could fight.

ROMAN MARS: The video went viral on Instagram and TikTok. And to hear the rest of the story–well–you’re going to have to stick around. Thank you so much for being on The 99% Invisible Power Broker Breakdown. It’s nice to have you.

SHILOH FREDERICK: Thank you. It’s fantastic to be here.

ROMAN MARS: So around September, 2023, you decided to do an extremely foolhardy thing. What was that?

SHILOH FREDERICK: I decided that I would tackle reading The Power Broker in 30 days. Splitting that up evenly, that would be around 39 pages per day, which–

ROMAN MARS: That doesn’t sound bad.

SHILOH FREDERICK: Any other book–it doesn’t sound bad, right?

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s very reasonable until you see the size of this book.

SHILOH FREDERICK: Exactly.

ROMAN MARS: And the density of it.

SHILOH FREDERICK: Yeah, the density is what really shocked me. I went into this thinking, “oh, 39 pages a day–this is going to be a breeze. It’ll probably be an hour or two of my day.” The very first day, I tried reading it at 6:00 AM just to get it out of the way. The first hour, I only ended up reading seven pages. And I was shocked. I realized this was going to be a lot more difficult than I thought.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. Okay. So, tell me about yourself and what you do. So, why did you feel like you needed to read the Power Broker?

SHILOH FREDERICK: So, as a job– I know some people don’t really consider this a real job, but–

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s okay. We’re podcasters, so none of us have real jobs.

ROMAN MARS: We’ve been pioneering the concept of a not real job for a long, long time.

SHILOH FREDERICK: So, you’re my people; you understand. But I create videos and blog posts and now branching out into zines on New York City history, specifically the buildings and the architecture history. But anything that catches my curiosity–I’ll make content around it and hopefully educate and entertain my audience with it. The stories that I was attracted to would be the stories of why things are the way they are. And when you put that in perspective of the world around you–looking at buildings and looking at designs and even looking at the MTA and what keeps things going… So, as a person who is studying New York City history for a living, I felt that my education of New York wouldn’t be complete without reading The Power Broker because this is a book that you see on all the must-read New York lists. It’s consistently on those lists, and I hadn’t read it. So, I felt that last September would be as good a time as any to start reading it–September being back to school season. And as someone who has been out of college for about seven, eight years, that was a shock. It was probably more difficult than any history course I’ve taken.

ROMAN MARS: So, as a native New Yorker, before you had read The Power Broker, were you aware of the impact Robert Moses had on your life?

SHILOH FREDERICK: Not at all. And now that I’m aware of it, his name is a name that I think about daily. It’s like a ghost haunting me.

ROMAN MARS: So, in what way?

SHILOH FREDERICK: Well, let’s see. So I currently live in a neighborhood called Inwood at the very top of Manhattan. You are probably familiar with it now because Woodhill Park is the park that Robert Moses destroyed to build the Henry Hudson Parkway. And taking walks in that park daily, I see that bridge. And every time I see it, I just want to shake my fist because it’s a very beautiful view that he’s ruined. But that’s only one of the things that I see on a daily basis that Robert Moses has affected. Surprisingly enough, he did not really affect the neighborhood that I grew up in. I grew up in Flatlands, but everything around it he’s had an effect on.

ELLIOTT KALAN: But I wonder if that’s the case because– Can you talk to us about the transportation situation in that part of Brooklyn? Namely, is there easy subway access to get in and out of that area of Brooklyn?

SHILOH FREDERICK: Now that you mention it, not at all. There is not easy subway access in Flatlands. I grew up having to walk an entire mile from my home to the nearest subway station, which is the Flatbush Avenue Station for the end of the 2 and the 5 line.

ROMAN MARS: Wow.

SHILOH FREDERICK: Flatlands is actually really car-centric. I grew up taking cars everywhere because the buses are… I wouldn’t say unreliable, but the buses aren’t the preferred method of transportation. So, you’re bringing up a good point.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s wild to me–the idea of growing up in Brooklyn and spending most of your time traveling in cars. Again, Brooklyn is enormous. New York is an enormous city. But it feels like your life then is being affected by his lack of interest in allowing the city to expand that subway system–that so much money was hoovered up for roads and so little was available for mass transit that even that neglect is impacting the lives of people around. It’s a powerful person where his positive actions affect people and his negative actions– By negative actions, I mean inaction. And by positive action, I just mean he’s doing something–not that it’s a great thing that he is doing. But his actions affect people, and his inaction affects people, which is astounding.

SHILOH FREDERICK: It is. It is. And I can think of people in my life who his actions have had a more direct, detrimental effect on. My fiancé grew up in the Bronx. And his house–his family’s home–is right on the corner where the Major Deegan Expressway and the Cross Bronx meet. He has been plagued with really severe headaches his entire life. And his sister–one of his little sisters–has severe asthma. Not surprising if you look at their house on Google Maps.

ROMAN MARS: Wow, that’s amazing. So you made an announcement video that you were going to read The Power Broker in 30 days. And then somewhere in the middle of the month, you ran across the decorations at Ten Mile River Playground. This is in the chapter about the West Side Improvement. One of the sort of innovations that Robert Moses comes up with to make it all affordable is, by the time it gets into Harlem, he’s not doing all the nice things that would make a park good. He’s not covering up the tracks. But one thing he does do is on one of the comfort stations–basically an outside public restroom… I think the base of the frame is silver. And then there’s these monkeys that are decorating it that are black. And they’re shackled to the sort of other part of the–

ELLIOTT KALAN: Not playful or enjoyable monkeys. They’re not monkeys that are having a great– Let alone the fact that they’re monkeys. They’re monkeys that look like they’re having a terrible time, they don’t want to be there, and are being kept there against their wills. There’s a number of different layers of terrible just kind of offensive messaging going on in these sculptures. It’s the efficiency of Robert Moses that he can offend on so many different levels in one design.

SHILOH FREDERICK: This is a little embarrassing. When I was reading that section of the book… Maybe it’s the effect of Robert Caro’s writing and just the buildup to it making me emotional. But realizing that Robert Moses had done something possibly so deliberate–something about that broke something in me.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. And so you decide that– This book was written 50 years ago. There’s no telling that those monkeys are still there or not. So, you go out there to go find them.

SHILOH FREDERICK: And I didn’t think I would find them. I thought, “Oh, this is going to be a quick trip–not even a quick trip. This will be a trip to Harlem–probably be a waste of time.” But something in me just wanted to confirm that it wasn’t there. And much to the opposite, it was still there 50 years later. anyone.

SHILOH FREDERICK (TIKTOK VIDEO): Anyone got a Ouija board? Because I’m about to knuckle up with this ghost.

SHILOH FREDERICK: I didn’t necessarily make that video to be an activist for removing the monkeys, but I thought that there was a story there that needed to be told–a little piece of history that I wanted people to be aware of at least.

ROMAN MARS: So, at what point did you learn that the monkeys had been taken down?

SHILOH FREDERICK (TIKTOK VIDEO): I never thought I’d be happy to see something lose its decoration, but I am ecstatic to confirm that Robert Moses’ Riverside Park monkeys–the black ones that were hanging by their wrists at Ten Mile River Playground in Harlem–they’re now gone.

ROMAN MARS: Because, at some point, the monkeys had been taken down. And I don’t think it was really announced that it happened. So, what did you find out?

SHILOH FREDERICK: I found out from a few followers that were sending me messages about this. Someone actually sent me an email. They found my email address, and they’re like, “Hey, I work for the parks department. And you’ll be happy to know that the monkeys that you talked about in your video are now gone.” I had to rush there immediately just to confirm what they said. Lo and behold, they were gone. I didn’t expect them to work so quickly, and I certainly didn’t expect them to do that off the back of a random TikTok video. But I later learned that the parks department has been trying to get rid of this for years. It’s been on the chopping block for years. So, putting out that video is either really good timing or the last push they need to get rid of it for good.

ROMAN MARS: And what did you think when that happened? I don’t know. How did it feel?

SHILOH FREDERICK: I still can’t believe that the city would work that fast.

ROMAN MARS: It’s almost Mosesian.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I was going to say, you’d think it would take a Robert Moses type figure to work that quickly. That is very fast.

SHILOH FREDERICK: That’s insanely fast. Deep down, I don’t believe that it was a video that did it. I’m so skeptical about the way New York City works and at the speed that it works that it can’t be a video that was put out a month before that encouraged them to take these decorations down. There’s no way. It didn’t even go that viral.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I don’t know about that though because, as we’ll see as we get further in the book, oftentimes when Moses is stymied, it’s because somebody is able to get the attention of the media or enough of the media at just the right moment to get in the way. And it feels like perhaps this was something that for 50 years had been on the “let’s take care of this” list. And then your video was the moment where they go, “Oh, somebody noticed this. Now we really have to take care of it. We should really do this thing that we’ve been meaning to do for all this time.” I don’t think you should undercut what you did. Take pride in it. Even if you weren’t the only thing that led to these being removed, I think you were definitely a part of it, I would say.

SHILOH FREDERICK: I struggle with taking pride in it because the historian in me is like, “How could you be proud of erasing a piece of history?” But I still struggle with this. But Robert Caro did extensive research for this. And I hadn’t seen anyone else talk about the monkeys being racist or any other documentation of that. So, I made that video off of the words of one source. And to me as a historian, that’s a big no-no.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, you’re right. I was too quick when I said that you should be proud. You’re right. I wasn’t thinking about that.

SHILOH FREDERICK: But the source that I’m basing this off of is Robert fricking Caro.

ROMAN MARS: That’s right.

SHILOH FREDERICK: Probably the greatest researcher of all time. So, if I’m going to take anyone at face value, it should be him. So, that’s my only solace in being part of removing this piece of history.

ROMAN MARS: I mean, this is interesting. So, there are definitely people who have argued, I think, since then that maybe–I don’t know–they’re perfectly innocent sculptures of shackled monkeys up on the grates and that also Harlem is a really different area 50 years ago than it was– Or even longer than that when he did this. It was in the ’30s?

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, late ’30s.

ROMAN MARS: In some way, that context exonerates Moses from this being sort of ill intent. I mean, what do you say to that? I don’t know. I don’t know what I think about it. I mean, I have my opinion. But what do you think when somebody says, “Well, how could you guess the intent of this man?”

SHILOH FREDERICK: It’s not like that’s the only seemingly racist thing he’s done in his career.

ELLIOTT KALAN: That’s true. He was not winning many NAACP awards at other parts of his career to be like, “You know what? Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt on this one.”

SHILOH FREDERICK: Yeah, exactly. It’s hard to give him the benefit of the doubt because his track record isn’t so great, at least when it comes to Black people.

ROMAN MARS: Well, I just think this is an intriguing moment of you sort of engaging with history, you presenting it to people, and it facilitating a change and a discussion that’s interesting. And it’s not just like a “yay, let’s remove everything” discussion. It’s a discussion about thoughtfulness and engaging with the environment and does the environment still work for everybody. And I just was so sort of inspired and intrigued by that. I love that it came from you reading The Power Broker like a crazy person in 30 days. We’re professionals who’ve read it three times. And I do not recommend reading it in 30 days.

SHILOH FREDERICK: No.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Did you find– What was the feeling like? I feel like it might be helpful for someone who’s had this experience to talk to our listeners, who might be pushing through the book. How did it feel at the end of the month, having read it so quickly? Were you proud? Were you dazed? You didn’t know what year it was anymore?

ROMAN MARS: How did you fill your hours when you were done?

SHILOH FREDERICK: “Dazed” is a very good word. I felt dazed for months afterwards, to be honest. I felt like my head was swimming. I felt like I was seeing the world with brand new eyes afterwards. And I’ll admit, I was very insufferable to the people around me because I would not shut up about The Power Broker and shut up about Robert Moses. I’m so grateful for my fiancé putting up with me for all these months. But I couldn’t stop seeing Moses’ effects on everything in New York City. And it doesn’t help that I take a lot of his major roadways all the time. I’m always on the FDR. I’m always on the West Side Highway–not as a driver but as one being driven around. So, it’s very Robert Moses of me.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, that’s the way he intended it to be used–being driven by someone else.

ROMAN MARS: But if you–as a historian and a person who loves New York–had your Moses-like powers, what would you do to change the city?

SHILOH FREDERICK: Immediate extension of the 2, 5 lines.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Say, like, one mile further?

SHILOH FREDERICK: Several miles further–all the way down to maybe Gerritsen Beach with a snap of a finger immediately. That wouldn’t do much to change my life, but still it would help all those people.

ROMAN MARS: The future Shilohs of the world. Yeah, it would be greatly impacted. That’s great.

SHILOH FREDERICK: Yeah, no one else walking in the snow and wind one mile to the subway station.

ELLIOTT KALAN: That makes a lot of sense. One of my favorite videos of yours is where you are sitting on the subway. And you’re just thinking about what if Robert Moses had loved mass transit as much as he had loved roads and cars–what a different, easier city it would be to get around in. And I feel like that–of all the historical what-ifs–put the finger on the biggest one for me in terms of Moses. Not just like, “What if he had built this thing? What if he hadn’t built this thing?” but “What if he had grown up loving trains the same way he grew up loving the idea of cars?” If he was like Walt Disney who loved trains all his life, how different would the city be? I was so wrapped up in Caro’s depiction of Moses that it never even occurred to me, “Oh yeah, he might’ve liked trains if he had given them a chance.” So, I really appreciated your putting it so simply.

SHILOH FREDERICK: I mean, who doesn’t like trains? Trains are so cool.

ROMAN MARS: I mean, every time I’m in another city with my kids and the whole family– The whole family–me and my wife and our six children–we went to Tokyo recently. And the whole time, I’m just like, “See how you can get around? See how amazing it is? It just feels so good. And it’s cool and air-conditioned and beautiful. There are clean bathrooms everywhere. How could you not be inspired by this?” It just blows my mind that a good, functioning train system is just so much cooler than any other alternative in my opinion. I just don’t get it.

ELLIOTT KALAN: We got to go back in time and make that case to young Robert Moses and maybe things will be different.

ROMAN MARS: Just give him a little model train and a little train book as a kid. You can just start ’em off. You wouldn’t have to go back for the kill-Baby-Hitler sort of variety of intervention.

ELLIOTT KALAN: No, no, no, no. Do it in a positive way.

ROMAN MARS: Just inspire him with a choo-choo set.

SHILOH FREDERICK: Yeah, just leave little model trains at his door, like surprise Tooth Fairy presents.

ROMAN MARS: Oh, New York would be so different. Oh my goodness. This is the sort of sci-fi fantasy book we should write about–if you could just inspire children to do different things. Well, Shiloh, thank you so much for all you’re doing in terms of just educating the public and your videos and stuff. And thanks so much for being on The 99% Invisible Breakdown of The Power Broker. It was a real delight to have you.

SHILOH FREDERICK: Thank you. This was an honor. I’ve been a long-time listener–since I was in college, I think–so this is amazing.

ROMAN MARS: Oh, sweet! Thank you so much for doing it.

SHILOH FREDERICK: Thank you so much.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Next month, we’re going to cover Chapters 35 through 38. That’s pages 807 through 894. But if you just can’t wait that long–if you just can’t wait a month–to hear me summarize something, then why not check out The Flop House, my bad movie podcast over on the Maximum Fun Network, where me and my friends, Dan and Stuart, will be talking about some bad movie in probably as much detail as we talk about The Power Broker on this show.

ROMAN MARS: We had a great time during our AMA on Discord last week. Thanks to everyone for showing up. Keep an eye out on the Discord for more details about our special talk with Robert Caro at the New York Historical Society to celebrate 50 years of The Power Broker. We cannot wait.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Robert Caro? In New York City? We are going to be there? I will tell you the absolute truth. I am missing an Iron Maiden concert for this. I planned months ago that I was going to go to this Iron Maiden show. It’s not going to happen because I’m going to be there with Robert Caro–and I’m only a tiny bit sad to be missing that concert because I’m going to be with Robert Caro.

ROMAN MARS: And make sure you get your Power Broker merch. It’d be very cool to fill the Historical Society’s event space with a bunch of Power Broker Breakdown band t-shirts. I mean, I’m going to be wearing a suit. And see, Robert Caro is going to be dressed to the nines, too. I don’t know. Maybe we should all dress up. I’m not sure. Anyway, all I know is, when I’m in New York, I will be very, very disappointed if I don’t see someone in a Power Broker t-shirt.

ELLIOTT KALAN: The 99% Invisible Breakdown of the Power Broker is produced by Isabel Angell–edited by committee. Music by Swan Real. Mix by Dara Hirsch.

ROMAN MARS: 99% Invisible’s executive producer is Kathy Tu. Our senior editor is Delaney Hall. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jayson De Leon, Emmet FitzGerald, Gabriella Gladney, Martín Gonzalez, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Jeyca Maldonado-Medina, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, Neena Pathak, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. The art for this series was created by Aaron Nestor. 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. We have fun discussions about The Power Broker, about architecture, about movies and music, about not getting credit for The New York Times like we deserve… It’s where I’m hanging out most these days. You can find a link to that Discord server as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.

SHILOH FREDERICK: Reading the sections about Robert Moses’ interaction with Fiorello La Guardia, something inspired me to do a search on their birthdays and their astrology signs. I’m not even an astrology person. I don’t even really believe in that. But I discovered that they’re both Sagittarius. And for some reason, that makes so much sense to me. A lot of it has to do with being stubborn–I’m doing the negative traits–but stubborn and reckless and selfish and very self-aggrandizing as well as being big dreamers. And reading those was like, “Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding!” They both have those traits, so no wonder they butted heads so frequently.