The Power Broker #9: Majora Carter

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

ELLIOTT KALAN: And I’m Elliot Kalan.

ROMAN MARS: So, today we’re still in Part Six: The Lust for Power. We’re covering four chapters–35 through 38–that’s pages 807 through 894. And later in this episode, our special guest is Majora Carter. Majora is a neighborhood developer from the South Bronx. Growing up, she always viewed her neighborhood as a place where she had to leave to find success. But as she got older, she became more involved. She began undoing some of Moses’s legacy, and she became a champion for bettering neighborhoods like the South Bronx so that there are places where people want to remain even when they have been ruined by a tyrant.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Before we get started with one of my favorite chapters in one of my favorite books–so it’s going to be great–we did want to talk about something that we teased last month, our very special live event with Robert Caro. Roman, me, and Robert Caro on stage, reunited for the first time, at the New York Historical Society. I’m so excited about it. It’s going to be great. But when the tickets went on sale, they sold out almost immediately, which made us very proud. But we know it was disappointing for a lot of you who did not get a chance to buy tickets. We’re really sorry about that. If we could have held the event at a stadium large enough to hold you all, we would’ve done it. But you are not totally out of luck. You can still watch the event on your computer. Live stream tickets are still available. You can go to nyhistory.org/programs to learn more.

ROMAN MARS: So, on the last episode of the 99% Invisible Breakdown of The Power Broker, we covered chapters 33 and 34, which detailed the ways in which Robert Moses spent the 1940s and ’50s becoming the center of political corruption and honest grafts in the New York City construction world and his lust for power that has transformed them into this kind of political machine boss that he used to despise when he was a young reformer. And then, Caro does this delightful chapter on the three mayors that followed La Guardia, which did not warrant their own chapters.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s hard to imagine a version of the book where Mayor Impy gets a full chapter to himself–as much as I love that section so much.

ROMAN MARS: So, it’s just a series of mayors that he dominated during this period of time. And on this episode, we’ll be continuing our jaunt through Part Six: The Lust for Power by looking at chapters 35 through 38 in the print edition. That’s pages 807 to 894. And chapter 35 is titled R.M. And that doesn’t stand for “Roman Mars,” unfortunately. That would be a fantastic chapter.

ELLIOTT KALAN: When you first turned the page, did you think for a second, “Oh, I’m in this book.”

ROMAN MARS: “Oh yeah, I signed off on something.” No, R.M. stands for “Robert Moses.” And more importantly, R.M. is what the Moses man called Robert Moses through a lot of his life. So, let’s talk about this chapter because it’s kind of a fun chapter in certain ways. I know this is one of your favorites, Elliott. So, what do you like about it?

ELLIOTT KALAN: So, this chapter–it is very fun. And the rest of the episode is going to be less fun because I love this chapter partly for what it does on its own and partly how it works in counterpoint with the chapters that come right after it because this chapter is entirely about Robert Moses’ imperial control of the world of the Triborough and park system. But there’s a lot of, also, like… I’m going to say public power wealth porn, where Caro was taking you through the experience of being a guest at a Robert Moses event and kind of the resources he has and the ways he uses them and just for entertaining people who he can use in some way. And I just love the feeling of ridiculous opulence–ludicrous opulence–that Caro presents this chapter. It feels, like, satirical. This chapter feels satirical to me to the point that it feels kind of silly. But then the chapters after it are so much more somber and so much more hard-hitting that I love the trick that Carol pulls here where you’re like, “I’m having fun. Robert Moses–you know what? He could have me over to his personal open-air arena anytime.” And then the next chapters are: “And here’s what that power was doing.” It wasn’t just bringing people to parties where there are martini fountains, as we’ll see as we get into the chapter. But it’s fun while it lasts.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, and it’s one of the things about the book– When a book is this long, getting a bird’s eye view of what these two chapters juxtaposed against each other–you do get kind of lost sometimes because you’re spending 30, 40, 50 pages on one thing. And it’s kind of hard to know, “Oh yeah, they’re setting up all this sort of excess and opulence and how he’s getting things done.” And then, I mean, there’s dark sides. Even that part is dark in its way.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I mean, even this part–he doesn’t come off as a great guy. It’s not like it’s like, “Yeah, he’d be fun to hang out with.” And also the juxtaposition of the money at his command to do things juxtaposed, in the next chapters, with people who are in the lower middle, lower classes and how they barely have the money they need to pay for their rent. Just the juxtaposition between the two is very stark.

ROMAN MARS: Well, because we got out of the timeline a little bit because we went through those three mayors, let’s just get our bearings here. So, this chapter starts when Moses is 60 years old. It’s 1948. He’s kind of at the height of his power. And let’s sort of describe where he is at this point.

ELLIOTT KALAN: So, Robert Moses at this point–he has something like nine or 10 public official posts. He has all this money flowing in from the bridges and the tunnels now also. I think he still has the Tunnel Authority; he controls the tolls that are coming in from those. So, as you may remember from last time, this is when he has built this kind of personal corruption machine. And it’s starting to get really into motion at the late ’40s. This is when it’s really ramping up, and he can do basically what he needs to. The federal government’s pouring tons of money into cities. The city government does not have the money to pay for its own things. And now Robert Moses has access to all that. And he doesn’t just have access to money. Caro talks at the beginning of this chapter–describes him as having this incredible access to the ability to do work. He has a voracious appetite for power and a voracious appetite for work. He has no hobbies except for swimming, which he does at night often. Otherwise, his entire life is work. Caro tells a story about a play–a Broadway musical–called Fiorello that was about Fiorello La Guardia. And Moses went to go see it because he had known La Guardia. And this is 1960, and he goes, “Oh yeah, that’s the first Broadway show I’ve been to in years.” He doesn’t do anything for recreation. And he’s still relying on his wife, Mary, to do… Like, she arranges his haircuts, she arranges his clothes, and she makes sure that the stuff in his pockets that he needs is the right stuff. And he’s just focused on work all the time. If he goes on vacation, then part of that vacation is spending time with people that he needs to lobby for support for his projects. Caro refers to it, on page 808, as a “feast of work.” And I love that phrase because it gets across that he’s not burdened by all this work. He loves it. He wants it. He wants to be doing this. And 10 years later, at 1958, Caro is saying that Moses–at 70–he’s still sitting at that feast. He can’t get enough of it. He just loves working. He wants to do nothing else but work, which gives him a real leg up on most human beings who like to stop working every now and then.

ROMAN MARS: That’s right. And he goes through all these sort of things where he’s working all the time. The secretaries work all the time. He turns his car into a working office, and I love this detail that he purposely doesn’t put a phone in so that he can do more work in the car.

ELLIOTT KALAN: He doesn’t want to be interrupted. If he can get away to a place where people can’t reach him, it’s not like, “Oh, I have a minute to myself.” It’s like, “Good, I can get this work done finally.”

ROMAN MARS: It makes a point in saying that the car is a limousine where the windows don’t go all the way to the back, so he doesn’t look out the window when he’s being driven around so he can just work. It’s really something else.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s amazing. Caro’s like, “1955, he has an eye operation. The next day, he’s sitting in the hospital dictating letters and memos to secretaries.” Another time, he’s got a 104 degree fever. He’s in bed, but he’s still taking meetings in bed. He’s still doing work. And he’s presenting this portrait of Moses who is so full of energy. He’s always pacing; he’s always impatient. And the image you get of him, which is kind of… No, it would be tragic if he wasn’t ruining so many people’s lives or sad in that way. It’s someone who is very aware that the things he wants to accomplish are more than a reasonable life can contain. And so he’s pushing himself and he’s pushing the people around him so fast and so hard so he can get even a fraction of his dreams into reality.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, yeah. And he’s still swimming at night. His aide starts swimming with him because they’re worried about him going out into the ocean by himself. But he outpaces all of the swimmers. I mean, it’s pretty funny how much Caro talks up all of his physical prowess and his ability.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I mean, we’re getting into Paul Bunyan territory at a certain point, where it’s like, “They swam with him and they couldn’t keep up even when he was in his sixties. What an amazing swimmer.” It’s like New York tall tales, and it’s really amazing. But also, here’s the thing that speaks to me particularly. At the same time Moses is doing all this work, he’s also doing a lot of writing. He needs money because the jobs don’t pay him that much, and he lives a lavish lifestyle. So, he is writing articles for pay. He writes dozens of articles for magazines, and he takes the time… Apparently, he always wanted to write kind of trash novels. And so, he writes a pulp romance novel called From Palms to Pines that is rejected by all publishers. I’m sure it’s terrible. And someone who, I think… If I’m remembering correctly, Caro was like, “Someone read it and was like, ‘There’s more sex in it than I thought there would be.'” But Caro makes it clear that, even if it’s a bad novel, Moses wrote an entire novel while he’s also holding down eight full-time executive jobs and all these other side things that he– It’s amazing. Where’s he finding the time to do it? Well, I mean, he’s finding the time to do it because he can yell at people and tell them not to call him at work. He has his own private car and everything. But it’s just amazing–the amount of work he’s capable of doing. But I think it’s very funny. There’s this alternate universe where Robert Moses sold that novel and he was like, “I’m done with city building. Now, I’m just like Harold Robbins. I just write kind of trashy novels. That’s what I do!”

ROMAN MARS: But the funny thing is about all this money that he needs is that when Caro sort of lays out all of his privileges and the access to things that he has at his disposal, it’s kind surprising he needs money at all because he has these restaurants that are just staffed and ready for him to go to and get fed. He has access to a yacht at all times. He has three drivers, which is, like…

ELLIOTT KALAN: He has three drivers in eight-hour shifts so that they can always be ready at any time. He has the yacht, and the captains just sit there by the phone every day just in case he wants to go out on it. Then the restaurants– So, these are amazing. So, at three different offices, he has full dining rooms with cooking and serving staffs. And again, they’re just there. They’re just on call every day in case he decides he wants to host a lunch in that office. And as Caro keeps saying, this is the kind of thing that a king has. A king has these kinds of people waiting on him all the time.

And there’s a couple– In this section, I’d love to read just a few of these short sections because I love the way Caro just kind of– It’s almost, like, breathless the way he writes some of these descriptions as if like, it’s “Can you believe this? This is amazing, but also this is ridiculous. Can you believe this stuff?” And so he talks about bringing you into the experience of being with Robert Moses and being entertained this way. And I have to assume it is because he probably experienced a fair amount of this. In the notes, I think he talks about a day when he was given kind of the Robert Moses treatment before R.M. cut him out when he was still interviewing with him. It says, “Waiting to lunch with Robert Moses, a guest would be ushered at Randall’s Island into an anteroom lined with pictures of Robert Moses’ bridges, Robert Moses’ parks, Robert Moses’ parkways, of Robert Moses posing with Hoover, of Robert Moses posing with Roosevelt, of Robert Moses posing with Truman, with Eisenhower, and later with Kennedy and Johnson and Pope John at Belmont Lake into an anteroom with walls covered literally from wall to ceiling with Robert Moses’ plaques and trophies. There might be a gleaming white scale model or two of past or future achievements lying carelessly about… Finally, R.M. himself would appear at the head of a procession of eight or ten aides. For if emperors had courts, so of course did he. If by chance he was called out of the room to take a telephone call, when he returned, his aides would jump to their feet and would not sit down until he sat down… The food at lunches at Randall’s Island–not special luncheons, just the typical lunch served by white coated waiters to groups ranging in size from half a dozen to half a hundred–perhaps 150 times a year was spoken of by guests in tones of awe.” And I just love the… You can so luxuriate in that. But he’s also getting across that it’s not just that Moses likes this stuff for luxury sake, although I’m sure he does a certain amount. It is a way of expressing power when you’re being feted by Robert Moses, you are being overwhelmed by the power of this guy and what he can do. And you go to lunch with him, he will talk the entire time. He does not let you do any talking. Caro says that there’s a reporter who went to one of these lunches and secretly timed it–checking his watch–and he came back and said, “Well, Moses talked for an hour and 20 minutes straight without interruption.” And all of this is a way of softening you up so that you are ready for the hard sell that he’s going to make on you.

ROMAN MARS: And he’s surrounded by all these people so that if you have any type of disagreement with him or come to just bring up any point, he’ll go, “I don’t know. That sounds dumb to me. What do you think, Sam? What do you think, Jimmy? What do you think of this?” And they all go, “I think it’s just dumb. I think you’re right, sir.” And then he’s like, “Yep, that’s what I thought.” And that’s it.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s amazing how openly straightforward it is–that it’s like, “Yeah, all my guys say I’m right. So, are you going to argue with a whole room full of people?” And those guys–I should say–they are guys for the most part. They’re “Moses men,” they call themselves. They also feel that power themselves. And Caro talks about–this is another passage–them getting the news as Robert Moses is being driven to work. As he passes each kind of toll booth or a stopping point, he doesn’t stop. He goes straight through. But as he passes what would be stopping points for normal people, the people at those points are calling the office to say, “R.M. is five minutes away. R.M. is three minutes away.” It says, “They would hurriedly recheck one last time to make sure that any map or blueprint for which he might ask was ready for his perusal. Scurrying back and forth, secretaries would put a dozen freshly sharpened pencils in the pencil holder on his desk, straighten the pile of letters there, dust his office one last time. ‘Worst of all,’ says one, ‘was when he headed first from his Babylon home to Belmont Lake, for that trip took only about five minutes. Everyone would start shouting, “The boss is coming! The boss is coming! He’s on his way over from Thompson Avenue!” And everyone would start rushing around in little circles as if they were crazy.'” And it’s just the idea that they are keeping tabs on how many minutes they have before he gets to the office so they can get things just right because part of this workaholism and this energy is he also has a temper and he’s known to slam his hand down on his desk or punch the wall or yell at people. It’s all power. It’s all ways of imposing your will on other people.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. And it is not just Randall’s Island where he hosts these folks. The real place to host people to show the glory of Robert Moses is Jones Beach–this great triumph early on–and is still kept up as a kind of a temple to Robert Moses at this period.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Jones Beach is still an amazing– It’s the greatest bathing beach in the world, probably, according to Moses. And he has all these things there so that he can take his guests and they can go yachting, they can go horseback riding, and they can go swimming. There’s fancy food. The restaurants there pay ludicrously low rents to the department. And in exchange, they are just always available to host Robert Moses’ guests for free, I assume. And similarly, he runs the Jones Beach Marine Stadium that way, which is an 8,200-seat theater that is essentially his private theater. There’s this stage on a manmade island that’s separated from the front seats by a moat. And the front seats are all luxury boxes that are reserved either for banks and corporations or for his personal guests–not the public. And the center box–the people who worked there nicknamed it the Royal Box. And that’s reserved for Moses and his personal guests. And whenever he’s there, the band leader, Guy Lombardo–a very well known band leader of the time– He’s mentioned in the lyrics to Guys and Dolls. He gets a personal introduction from the stage from Guy Lombardo. And Caro makes a point of saying that Moses acts as if “What? Oh, I don’t need it. I don’t need it.” He kind of acts like he’s ignoring it. Oh, it’s not special. But he kind of always shows up just at the right time to get this introduction. Or he’ll show up just to get the introduction and then leave the show.

And Moses decides what’s going to be on in the stadium–what shows are going to be there. Ticket sales–they’re never very good. The theater is rarely more than half full, but it doesn’t really matter because Moses is not really putting up a public theater. He’s putting up a place for himself to impress his guests. And another part of that is showing them, “I have Guy Lombardo on my personal call whenever–one of America’s biggest band leaders. And in exchange, all I have to do is let Guy Lombardo and his brother take all the money from the theater for themselves.” And it’s like the state built this theater for $4.2 million, and the state never sees that money back. It’s all going to Guy Lombardo. And it’s just another example of Moses saying, “I’m going to use the public money to build something. And I’m going to use it for my private needs of exposing power. And the way that I get that is by letting someone else make money out of it. The state pays the money. You take the money. I don’t want that. But I’m going to need you whenever I need a favor to impress somebody else.”

ROMAN MARS: And the thing is, again, he’s figured out something really critical, which is, like, you don’t need to take money from people if you use their money to give you everything you want anyway. Normally, if you want your own outdoor amphitheater on a beach, you have to pay $4 million to build that thing. But if instead you have other people build it, you don’t claim any part of it, but you use it as your own, that’s pretty much just taking it for yourself.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, that’s a good point. If it’s like, “Well, the house department is going to build this mansion for me. I’m going to live in it, but you know what? It’s just part of my public use.”

ROMAN MARS: If your house is paid for, your cars are paid for, your food is paid for, you have theaters and all this stuff happening for you, what do you need money for?

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yet he’s still constantly low on money and running into debt, which is astounding. So, this is a section that’s well worth reading for anybody where he takes you through what it’s like to be the guest of Moses. There’s this fleet of limos. There’s this concierge service that’s provided to you. “Would your children like to ride in a little boat with Guy Lombardo as he goes to the stage? They can do that. Would you like another martini? Of course, sir.” And you don’t get to see too much of Moses during these visits because he’s working. He has a cubicle built in the stadium–this little office that he can sit in so he can work, go up for his introduction from Guy Lombardo that he goes, “Oh, I don’t need it. I don’t need it,” and then leave and go back to work. And he’ll see you for a couple minutes. In those couple minutes, he’ll just totally charm you. He’ll be telling you anecdotes about all the amazing things he’s done in his career–kind of press you a little bit on the thing that he wants you to do. And then it’s over and the limousines take you back home again. Jones Beach–it’s almost like a corporate version of what Disneyland looks like in commercials is what it sounds like. For adult, mid-century, American professionals, it’s like this is their magical day in a kingdom run by this magical, powerful man.

ROMAN MARS: That’s right. And then he kind of does mini versions of this every time there’s an opening of a public work somewhere. He just lavishes everyone with food and champagne and waiters that dress to the nines and everything like this. He really does– He becomes his own kind of PR machine in a certain way through this whining and dining.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I mean, if you want to put a good spin on it, you could say, “Hey, he’s always up for a party. Any excuse for a party and he’s ready to have fun.” But it is always for a purpose. It is to get people on his side. It’s not just because he loves a good hang. But you’re right. In 1953, they’re opening some new toll booths on the northern state parkway. And he is like, “Yeah, we need a party. 40-foot long buffet table. Bring in the waiters. We need champagne to celebrate these new toll booths.” And if a big project opened, then it was just done in amazing style. And he is so particular about the details of what he does that he’s overseeing all this. It’s not like he tells his people, “Throw a party. Okay, great. We did it.” He is very particular about his style and what he wants to do.

And Caro quotes from a memo that I love so much. So, Arnold Schleifer–who was running Tavern on the Green, where he had gotten a sweetheart deal from Moses that he paid very little rent to run this restaurant in Central Park–he caters one of these. And I guess he tries to make it too fancy or too nouveau riche–I’m not sure. And Moses writes, “Last night’s Schleifer version of Belshazzar’s feast was contrary to all instructions. The catering crew was all right. The hat chicks were bells and knees.” Even the fact that he mentions the looks of the hat chicks is ridiculous. “And the barkeepers upheld the finest traditions of the craft. But the hor d’oeuvres were disgusting. Tray after tray of indigestible insides, cow’s eyes on mushrooms, squid in its own ink, pastry costume jewelry, mounted dog food, mayonnaise rococo, and gaudy gook. Hit Schleifer over the head for me. We are not celebrating a gangster wedding.” And I love that he is so– Everything has to be perfect for him. The hor d’oeuvres have to be the right kind of hor d’oeuvres. And at the same time, he is running so much of the construction in the city. But he’s still got time to get mad about these hors d’oeuvres.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, I think it’s hilarious. I mean, everything about him is tinged with a kind of xenophobia. You know what I mean? He’s basically saying, “I want normal food. You know normal food that white people eat? Normal food.” You know what I mean?

ELLIOTT KALAN: “Where are the deviled eggs? What’s going on here?” Later in that memo, he goes, “We want a few simple, appetizing things not a pastry competition to be judged by Pretzel Varnishers Union #3.”

ROMAN MARS: I mean, that makes me think his book was pretty good actually. “Pretzel Varnisher Union #3.” That’s some good detail.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I mean, it’s something similar to there’s certain people who are bad people and are very mean–but, in that meanness, they can say very funny things.

ROMAN MARS: I see what you’re talking about here.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And so, once again, this is not something he does just to feel like a big man or just because he enjoys it. This is a way also of rewarding people who have done things that he likes. He invites them to these parties–punishing someone who did something that he doesn’t like by denying them an invitation. It’s all tools of power. If you’re a reporter, he will give you special treatment until you write a negative article about him, and then you’re cut off and you don’t get it. And it’s a tool for persuading people. And Caro talks about how it is more difficult to challenge someone, to challenge their facts, and to challenge their argument when you are having cocktails in their territory and when they’re surrounded by people who agree with them. It’s very hard to disagree and challenge someone who is serving you a delicious lunch after bringing you over in a limousine. And when you know that if you disagree with him, he’s not going to be respectable. He’s not going to take it. He’s going to get very mad. And if he wants you to sign a document in that setting, it’s all ready for you, and he hands it to you at lunch, it’s very hard to say no. How do you find a polite way to say no? He has kind of weaponized mid-century etiquette and people’s natural want to be liked by the other person–or at least be approved of by another person–in a way that is really very cold and calculating.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. And so presenting all this sort of fun excess– I mean, I guess it’s fun excess. You can definitely find some nefarious undercurrent to all of this stuff. But mostly it’s presented as like, “Let’s just enjoy the details of this craziness.” Caro then sort of turns the chapter again and just reminds you, “Oh, by the way, here’s our guy that we’re talking about.” This is a guy who’s moved more earth than almost any human in the history of the world and sort of starts to go to set us up for the next chapter. But he’s really just talking about how the 20th century in New York City is just the age of Moses.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah. He starts kind of saying, “You basically can’t compare him with other people who have done these things.” You have to say, “Oh, the age of Moses is like the age of railroads.” Other people may have invented things or created things or built things. This guy is shaping a city, and he’s doing it over the course of 44 years. He’s in some form of high office–high appointed office from 1924 to 1968–and it’s just this enormous territory that he has so much control over. And Caro is quoting Moses at one point, predicting that his work’s going to stand through the year 1999 because it was a far off year at the time when it was written.

ROMAN MARS: No, I get it.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And Caro is like, “Of course it will.” He goes, “Why won’t it last 2,000 years? The works of ancient Rome–they lasted for millennia. There’s no reason to say that Moses’ work won’t.” And the funny thing there is that Caro–two of his examples that he gives are Shea Stadium and the New York Coliseum because they were so patterned on the Roman Coliseum. But then those are both gone.

ROMAN MARS: They did last until 1999, though.

ELLIOTT KALAN: That’s true. Yeah, that’s true. I’ll give you that. And Caro was like, “Unless there’s an atomic attack on New York or a massive natural catastrophe, New York will remain the city that Moses built and shaped far more than any other single person possibly to the end of human civilization,” which is really astounding. And he follows that up with… This has been a testament to Moses’ influence–to his power. And he follows that up with a testament to Moses’ kind of inability to change. And the flip side of that power is someone who refuses to listen to others and is even blind and deaf to their existence or needs. And he says that there’s a deliberate blindness–a deliberate deafness–to reason, to argument, and to new ideas.

And Moses–we’ve seen it many times–and Caro talks again: he doesn’t believe ordinary rules apply to him. There are little things. When he goes to the board of estimate to speak at a public meeting, every speaker is supposed to say their name and address just kind of to establish who they are and why they have a right to be there. And he refuses to do it, and nobody makes him. And when people in the crowd start going, “Make him say his name. Make him say his name,” the mayor is like, “Everybody knows who he is. He’s Robert Moses. Anyway, talk.” And when he needs beach grass to hold the sand around Idlewild Airport in place, he just sends his guys to steal it from private homes. And there’s a moment where W. Kingsland Macy–who you may remember, many episodes back, was Moses’ enemy in the ’20s and then became an ally of his–he’s like, “Why are parks employees starting to take the grass away from my house and other people’s houses?” And they don’t stop doing it until 13 parks employees are arrested by the police. Moses does not believe the rules apply to him because he thinks of himself at such a high level–that he’s a figure of such enormous history and importance.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there’s a mention that Caro says that he begins to think of himself as Abraham Lincoln. You’ve read a lot of books on Abraham Lincoln. Do you compare Robert Moses to Abraham Lincoln very often?

ELLIOTT KALAN: I will say– I mean the short answer is no. Long answer is, in Moses’ defense, Abraham Lincoln moved much less earth than Robert Moses, unless it was earth being blasted by canonshot, grapeshot, and things like that and artillery. But I would say no. There’s a grandiosity to that in the sense that their goals were different, I think, and the impact of one, over time, more positive than the other. But it really speaks to it that he is not just associating himself with a great, powerful person from history but from a revered, almost sacred person from American history.

ROMAN MARS: He’s basically America’s saint. We have a few of ’em. And Abraham Lincoln is one of them. And he puts himself in that territory. But I would say the strength of Abraham Lincoln is that he changed over time.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes, very much so.

ROMAN MARS: And Robert Moses has this inability to take in new information and change.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Not to get too much into Lincoln because I could talk about him for hours. We’ll do a Lincoln podcast eventually, I guess. But yeah, one of the many things that made him the great man that he was was that he was constantly questioning, “Do I really know the things that I know? Do I really understand the things that I understand,” and moving and changing with time and with thought and with reason and with changing events around him so that he can adjust himself to– People talk about rightfully because it’s true that Lincoln, for a while, believed that colonization of Africa was the only way to deal with the race problem in America–that Black people and white people can’t live in the same country. They have to go somewhere else and have their own country. But by the end of his life, he does not seem to have believed that; it seems to be a different thing. His exposure to new realities and his exposure to new ideas changed the way he thought. And the strength of him is in allowing himself that exposure even while in a position of power. Whereas Moses is deliberately going out of his way not to expose himself to new ideas, new realities, changing ways, and changing times because he doesn’t care. He doesn’t want to, he doesn’t care, and he doesn’t think it’s worthwhile.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, he’s really locked into… I keep on saying this sort of word “firmware.” He’s kind of locked into what was written down in his brain in the 1920s because so much of what he did was successful. It worked of the moment so that he got sort of intoxicated by his own success. But he really, like… The role of the automobile in society and the role of the automobile in cities changed so drastically from the 1910s to the 1950s. And he just did not seem to notice or care that that was the case. That is a remarkable thing for someone who maybe does things that I don’t agree with. But he definitely thought about the city a lot, but he just ignored this huge change of piece of information. It’s kind of stunning to me.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s amazing. It’s almost as if, Roman, you and I still thought about telephones as a thing that plugs into a wall–it’s only connected to a building and you can’t listen to music on it and you can’t look up information like a computer. It’s such a massive misunderstanding of the way a thing is used–the way that the other people think of the thing at that point. Maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit. I don’t know. But Robert Caro talks about Moses in the way you would talk about an artist–a genius artist–whose initial work is stunning, new, innovative, and exciting but who, because of the reputation of that work, can get away with this arrogance that they used to distance themselves from the world. And so, their later work becomes stale. It doesn’t work the same way that a genius– Even if you’re a genius, you still need to be rooted in some understanding of reality. And once you remove yourself from reality, your work becomes–at best–if you’re an artist, just unpopular. And at worst, if you are building massive roads through cities, it becomes catastrophic for the people who are living there.

ROMAN MARS: Absolutely. Absolutely. He just sort of puts this bubble around him. This is the other part of that world he creates–his kingdom that he creates–to entertain these people; he has this bubble around him that stops him from evolving in any significant way that would matter and so that it would serve a city and the people better.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah. And because he’s in that bubble, he never has to think about things–he doesn’t reflect. And Caro–I think he’s hit this before–the idea that Moses is working too fast. He’s not taking time. And Caro, of course, is not an author who believes in working fast. He doesn’t like to do things too quickly. And he says that there was a time when Moses had to ride a train from work to his home and would just stare out the window and see the world outside that window and think about it. And there was a time when he would spend days, if not weeks, if not months, tromping around in nature, experiencing what Long Island is actually like and thinking about the land there and how it could be used. And now, he doesn’t do those things. And Caro kind of implicitly approves of this earlier Moses because his methods are so much more like Caro’s methods. They’re methodical and detail-oriented. They’re thorough. They take time. And he disapproves of the later Moses, who’s very un-Caro-like, who is just like, “Got to do it. Get it done. Okay, put it in. Who cares? Move that over there. Yes, this is what we’re doing. Don’t listen to him.” And it’s a wonderful thing in a biography, I think, when you see the writer expressing their philosophy through what they’re doing in a way that is not just judgy–not just good or this is good and this is bad–but where you get the feeling that a person is writing this who has beliefs about how work should be done. And they’re expressing that not through just telling us but through the way they’re kind of talking about this other person. It’s exciting to me to read a biography where it feels like the author has a point of view about different things about it, other than was this a good guy or was this a bad guy?

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. And at this point in Moses’s life, this sort of deafness to new ideas is not metaphorical anymore. He actually is literally going deaf, which is another thing a biographer can’t resist.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Oh yeah. I mean, the subtext becomes instant text. But it’s like, “This is reality doing it. I don’t have to– Look!” The same way that he was like, “Hey. He tried to resign from that swim team from Yale and he resigned as a threat from this thing? This is gold!”

ROMAN MARS: Exactly.

ELLIOTT KALAN: “This is wonderful!”

ROMAN MARS: So, he has hearing aids. He’s very sensitive to these things because a lot of his way of being–his bearing–depends on a kind of physical dominance.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And there’s so much in this book that I feel like Caro is only scratching the surface of because I don’t think he wants– He psychologizes sometimes, but not too much. Robert Moses is clearly afraid of dying–clearly knows that he will die someday–is afraid of being forgotten, and is afraid of being someone who hasn’t made a mark on the world. And so, he wants to stay young. He wants to be young and vigorous and vital. And so he’s always swimming. And he’s got to keep making things. He’s got to show that he’s powerful. And once you stop hearing, you’re old–you feel old. People think of you as old. He can’t have anyone think of him as the old man. And we’ll see later on, when he is no longer in power, that one of the big blows against him is that now he’s the old man. Who cares?

And so, he’s doing whatever he can to try to not let people know that he’s deaf. The degree that he goes to not wear a hearing aid seems really ridiculous. He’s got this system of amplifiers on microphones installed in his office so that there’s a hidden microphone in his desk. So, when someone’s talking to him at his desk, their words are being screamed at him, I guess, from a hidden speaker behind him so that it looks like he’s listening to them and can hear what they’re saying. But even that doesn’t work before too long. And you’re just like, “Mr. Moses–R.M.–if you wear a hearing aid… I mean, people will see it, but you’ll be able to hear what people are saying.” But there’s a vanity to him and not wanting to be old that’s causing him trouble.

ROMAN MARS: But Caro is very quick to point out that this sort of deafness–the metaphorical deafness–is much more important than his literal deafness. He cannot update to the world that– He mentions that he thinks of golf as just being only for rich people in the 1920s. In the ’50s, maybe it was less so. It’s a little bit more available to the proletariat. But–

ELLIOTT KALAN: If he had watched any episode of The Honeymooners, he’d see that the characters on that play golf. One of ’em works in the sewers, and the other’s a bus driver. We’re no longer in The Legend of Bagger Vance type territory, where golf is just for the rich.

ROMAN MARS: And he doesn’t notice the change in public transportation and cars. He really has just been on autopilot but has so much power that it can be quite devastating. And he wields that power like a meat axe. So, that brings us to the next chapter, which we’ll get to after the break.

[AD BREAK]

ROMAN MARS: Now on to Chapter 36: The Meat Axe, which is quite a name.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I think it’s going to be positive. I think that it’s going to be a positive chapter. The Meat Axe. This is something you will see at the end of the chapter. This is from a quote from Moses–this phrase, the Meat Axe. But it’s such a horrifying sounding thing. And it’s like a cleaver, right? But to say a “meat cleaver” or a “butcher knife” feels so much less terrifying than the “meat axe.” Like, you shouldn’t be hitting meat with an axe. That’s not what that should be. It’s so frightening. So going into this chapter, Roman, you were like, “Oh, The Meat Axe. This is going to be more about the cooking at his restaurants.”

ROMAN MARS: No, sir. It’s not.

ELLIOTT KALAN: So, at the beginning of the chapter, there’s something Caro’s doing here that… It felt a little interesting to me that he’s doing it now. We’re 837 pages into the book, and only now is Caro kind of comparing Moses’ roads to the great roads of history, which… As we said in the last chapters, all this dirt was moved. He is compared to the Pharaohs before. And only now is he talking about roads–historical roads. And the reason is this chapter is kind of the first of a trilogy of chapters that form a sort of sub book within this book that all kind of go together as one– Maybe it’s one episode of The Power Broker TV show. And to do that, he wants to give you a set. He’s taking that idea of Moses as this world historical urban figure and transitioning it to a much smaller human level.

And so he starts talking about how Moses’ roads compare to the Royal Road of Persia, which is 1500 miles, or the Silk Road or the ancient Roman highways. And he says that the people building these roads–thousands of years ago–they had to deal with bad terrain, bad weather… I don’t think he mentioned it, but primitive technology– But they did not face the major complication that Robert Moses faced in New York. And he says it this way: “They did not have to evict from their homes tens of thousands of protesting voters, demolish those homes, tunnel under or cut across subways and elevated railroads, sewers, and water mains and gas mains and telephone and electric conduits and cables, all of which–providing a city with essential services–had to be kept in operation during construction. They did not have to solve these problems in space almost unbearably constricted because to obtain a single extra foot of width would require additional thousands of evictions.” So, he’s saying this is the difference with a Moses road; it is being carved through a living city. And the consequence of that is what we’re going to be looking at in a small scale example in these next couple of chapters.

And he points out how the roads built in ancient cities–they were much smaller. And mostly they weren’t meant for cars. They’re meant for people. They’re meant for horses–goats probably, too. Probably goats and probably cows, too. But these are highways. These are built for cars and trucks. The people building the Silk Road and the Roman roads–they didn’t have to deal with that stuff. And so now, in 1945, Moses is planning to build these enormous superhighways straight through the heart of the most densely populated city in the United States. He’s going to build more super highway miles in this one city than up to that point had ever been built in all the cities of the world in human history–this new, massive form of road for motorized, intense vehicles. And he’s going to do it through New York City–a city that never sleeps. You can’t even do it while people are sleeping and they don’t notice because it never sleeps.

ROMAN MARS: And as much as that passage talks about the cables and the wires and the tunnels and the stuff, what the real problem here is that people live on this land. The final word is evictions. And that’s pretty much what the next couple chapters is about–the number of evictions required to do the work that Moses feels is necessary.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And we should mention, of course, that the story of America is the story of building things on lands where people have to be evicted because there were already people living on it.

ROMAN MARS: Yes.

ELLIOTT KALAN: But he’s going to start by talking about… There’s the seven-mile Cross Bronx Expressway, which we’ve mentioned on the show before. And it is–if you’ve never driven on it–essentially a trench gouged through the Bronx. When you’re driving through it, you look up and you see there’s apartment buildings on either side. You’re right through the middle of the city, and it’s going to be disruptive. They’re going to destroy hundreds of buildings. Half of ’em apartment buildings. But they’re going to have to also, as I said, gouge this trench through the city–this enormous trench–without disturbing all the things that keep the city moving. They’re going to have to cross the grand concourse, which is the major thoroughfare of the borough. And you can’t shut the road down for the years it’s going to take to build this thing. They’re going to have to dig under it.There’s only one problem with digging under the streets of New York. That’s where the subway lives. Did you forget there’s a train underneath there? So, they have to go under the subway, which means blasting through the rock. The reason New York can exist is because it’s on this incredibly hard rock foundation! And they’re going to have to blast through that. And a lot of this chapter is about the technical difficulty of building this road.

And then on top of that, Caro’s going to layer this even more important layer of the people on top of that road. And while they’re doing it, there’s no wiggle room. They’re going to have to be blasting through rock and digging a trench underneath train tracks that they need to keep up and not shake too much. And they’re also building through areas where Moses is already building other roads at the same time. Caro makes this whole thing sound impossible–just, like, an impossible feat of engineering.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. This is one of those sections where what Caro covers in a couple of paragraphs represents an enormous amount of research. It’s just mind-boggling. Having to often tell stories in this vein, the fact that he just sort of dashes off the type of rock and the distance and the time and the grading and all the different alternates and everything about it is just a stunning amount of work. When I read this, just having covered this type of stuff for now a decade and a half–

ELLIOTT KALAN: That’s an old infrastructure reporter hand.

ROMAN MARS: Seven years doesn’t seem like enough time to write this book, to tell you the truth. That in and of itself would’ve taken weeks or months of just getting the details right. It kind of blows my mind.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And then to have to synthesize it into a very short amount of space because, for all that work, the reader is not going to want to read a whole chapter about the type of rock that they’ve got. You’re right. It’s an enormous amount of… I hadn’t even thought about that because so much of the research, in my mind, about this book is him interviewing people and him going through documents. And yet there’s so much just knowledge that he needs about how the city operates, even without Moses and things like that. But they’ve got to do all this crazy stuff. They’ve got to jack up the rapid transit train line, like, three tenths of an inch at a time because the trains are still running on the line as they’re jacking it up. And he talks about how the job is so difficult that they have to move a river 500 feet. And that’s one of the things nobody bothers talking about afterwards because it’s one of the smaller things they had to do. They’re building these enormous interchanges for connecting the expressways. There’s barely enough room for the road, let alone the machines and the workers that have to build it. They’ve got to design new equipment. They have to use handmade, steel reinforcements because the steel has to be shaped so precisely. And this is just one of 13 expressways that Moses is building throughout the city. This is seven miles out of 130 miles of Moses city expressway.

And the other expressways are not easier. Like you talked about, the Van Wyck Expressway? They have to hold up the Long Island railroads 13-track switching yard up in the air. Caro says it’s the busiest stretch of railroad in the world. They have to hold it in the air for seven months steady so the trains can run through it while they’re building a road underneath it. It’s phenomenal. And he says, “The roads cost at least $10 million per mile to build.” And this is in the ’40s and ’50s. And he says, “The total cost to all the roads Moses built in the city after World War II is over $2 billion.” It’s astonishing–just the resources going into this–because the thing they’re doing is bonkers.

ROMAN MARS: It’s amazing. I have this one little detail. This is not in the text at all. This is just something that happened to me when I was in Milan.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Huh. Must be nice. Alright. Okay, sure.

ROMAN MARS: They have all these beautiful things in Milan and the Duomo in Milan–the Piazza del Duomo–is there. And it is gorgeous. And it’s a sort of gothic cathedral there. And it had been there, obviously, a long time. And they started to build the subway underneath it. And so my favorite detail, and amongst all this amazing filigree and amazing statuary–

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s a very pointy building. I’m looking at it now. It’s very pointy.

ROMAN MARS: It’s super pointy. It has lots of details in it. But it has these things up called “little noses.” And they’re these little bulbous things. And they were put on the columns, and they were like a little stone bulb–like a little nose–that sticks out. And it had a piece of glass inside. Think of it like a laboratory slide–a microscope slide. And they put it in there because if they found that the subway tunneling broke the glass inside the slide, they would stop and reinforce everything. And so, it was a little check against destroying these amazing old artifacts. And that’s what I think of when I think about them trying to build all this stuff underneath all this other stuff that’s already built. Anyway, that’s a little detail of the world. That’s a little 99% Invisible detail. Now, I can write off my trip to Italy.

ELLIOTT KALAN: When I go someday, I’m going to be looking for those. And if I don’t see them, I’ll be texting you–I’ll be like, “Roman! Where do I find them?”

ROMAN MARS: They’re called the “little noses.” And they’re to sniff out whether there was too much seismic activity because of digging underneath these sort of national treasures.

ELLIOTT KALAN: That’s amazing. I want to believe that Moses was putting that kind of care into the things above him, but I have trouble believing it. I have trouble imagining it.

ROMAN MARS: Me too.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And Caro loves to talk about– I think he really enjoys talking about the scale of all these things. And the one thing I want to mention is how he talks about how the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge is the longest suspension bridge in the world at the time. He goes, “Its towers so far apart that, in designing them, allowance had to be made for the curvature of the Earth.” He’s just like, “This is big. This is big. Big stuff. Big stuff.” And he’s got the people to do it. Moses’ engineers–they’re up to the task. His staff is all about getting through red tape. The office is working nonstop. When they need permissions for things, they will bother any city official. They’ll call them at midnight. They will show up at a Broadway show that someone is attending and make them sign it in the dark at their seat. They get all this money. They put through this $500 million bond issue, and that’s still not enough money. They’ve got to wait for the 1956 Federal and Interstate Highway Act. And then Moses has to lobby them to put in a provision allowing toll roads to be eligible so he can get some of that money. And Caro says–I love this line–he goes, “There were other minor but irritating inconveniences–wars, for example. The Korean conflict was a source of real irritation.” And it’s like all Moses cares about is his stuff. So, they’re like, “Well, we need this steel for the war effort to make sure that communism doesn’t overrun South Korea.” And he’s like, “I don’t care.” And he’s lobbying the federal government. They let him use 10% of the entire civilian supply of steel for the country. It’s just for his stuff. And he’s like, “That’s not enough.” And he starts attacking them in the media until they give him more. It’s really amazing. And he’s doing a similar thing of making deals with different power areas in the city to get land and things. “I’ll trade the Catholic church a little bit of land here so they can have some land there. I’ll do that with ConEd. And he makes the city feel like it’s a giant Rubik’s cube that he can just manipulate and change in different ways. He’s moving buildings everywhere just because he can. And he seems to have a real joy of the power of being able to manipulate these enormous, physical masses the way that he wants them to be manipulated.

ROMAN MARS: And because he does it so often, he so revels in his ability to come up with a solution of turning to church 90 degrees, so it fits on a lot or whatever. But also, because he does it so much, when he really bungles it, he kind of doesn’t care. He just kind of laughs it off and is just like, “Oh, that was a real boner. I didn’t create that one right.” But he doesn’t care because he does it so much. You just get used to that type of failure. And for him, it matters nothing for his overall goal.

ELLIOTT KALAN: He really treats the city–the real city people live in–as if it is a model that he is able to move around and change things like that. It’s really amazing. And who wouldn’t want that power? I mean, that’s literally the fantasy of children everywhere–to have a play city that you could move around and control the people of. So, really, I guess you could say Moses is just young at heart.

Anyway, the biggest problem he has, though… And this is where we’re going to go from kind of the awe of what Moses can do and being like, “Eh, he’s kind of a stinker, but look at what he’s accomplishing,” to the real problem at heart of it. His real problem is the physical difficulties. It’s bureaucracy, and it’s politics. And Caro says that these great roads that I mentioned earlier–the Roman roads, the Persian roads, the silk roads, the Autobahn in Germany–those were not built by democracies. Those were built by kings. Those were built by führers. A totalitarian government can say, “All of our money is going to a big road that’s going to go through your house, and you have to deal with it.” But in a democratic society, people need to agree that a work of this impact is worth the expense–is worth the impact. And some people might see a need for this road, but a lot of people might not. And nobody, I think, is ever like, “I believe in this road so much that I don’t want a house anymore. I don’t want to live here. I will give up my house for this.”

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. And this is his big impediment–democracy. And again–we have to get to this point–he has never been elected at all. He is not really that big of a friend to democracy, but he had to solve the problem of the democratic process slowing him down. And basically he says that Moses solved it by ignoring democracy.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah. It’s not that he never takes people into consideration. Sometimes he will move a building rather than destroying it–although, as we know, he seems to love moving buildings. So, there’s a little joy in that. But if he cannot do that and it’s a choice between the project and people in the way of the project, he will always choose the project–always.

And Caro says that Moses “took people into consideration mostly by enjoying the act of imposing his will on them.” And Caro tells the story of Moses driving somewhere being driven somewhere and stumbling on an anti-Moses demonstration and just sitting there laughing and laughing and watching the whole thing and laughing at it. And I have to assume it is the laughter of someone who knows, “These people are mad at me, and they can’t do a thing about it. It does not matter.” And Caro quotes Moses saying that to build a metropolis, “you have to hack your way with a meat axe.” And so, Caro says the meat axe metaphor “expressed his philosophy. But it was not philosophy but feelings that dictated Moses’ actions. He didn’t just feel that he had to swing a meat axe. He loved to swing it.”

ROMAN MARS: Wow. There you go. And that’s the chapter, Meat Axe. In the end, they deliver what the meat axe is all about–he likes wielding it–which brings us to probably the most consequential chapter, I think, in the whole book. It’s called One Mile. We’ll cover it after this.

[AD BREAK]

ROMAN MARS: Okay, up next is Chapter 37. It’s called One Mile. It is probably the most important chapter of the book. I don’t know. I don’t know how to quantify that sort of stuff, but it’s the culmination of everything. And if I were to boil it down to what Robert Caro wanted to do with this whole indictment of Robert Moses, I think this is the chapter that explains most of his motivation.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes, I agree. I think this chapter really feels like–for Caro–it is the heart of the book. It is, I think, the chapter that’s closest to his heart. When he talks about writing the book, this is the chapter that he talks about the most–the one he wants to talk about the most. And I agree with you. If you were like, “I can’t read this whole book. Give me one chapter to read so I can get the gist of it,” this chapter, in many ways, kind of says the things that Caro wants to say with the book in miniature–in one example–which is to say that you should read the whole book. The whole book is amazing, obviously. But if you were looking at this book in a fractal sense, this chapter is his purpose and is the intention of the book in miniature.

And it opens with such simplicity. It says, “Robert Moses built 627 miles of roads in and around New York City. This is the story of one of those miles.” And from that point, he is bringing you to such a personal level about the effect of Robert Moses’ work that I remember reading this chapter for the first time and it was one of the many times where I read the book where I got really mad. I got viscerally very angry about what was happening. And these are things that happened before my parents were born. This is stuff from past history, and yet he manages to make it feel so alive and so vivid and also so contemporary in that these are issues that we’re still going to deal with forever about balancing big needs versus small needs and individual lives versus ideas of the greater good. And it’s a really amazing chapter, and it makes you wish you could step in and stop it from happening.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, it has that quality to it because you see these moments of where history could have changed. And you just really want it to change for these folks. So, the chapter really is about one mile and the seven miles of the Cross Bronx Expressway. And he talks about it. It’s this really interesting moment in the beginning–I don’t know if it’s even picked up on as much as I would want it to be–but he’s setting the table for this. Like, Moses is an engineer that wants to just put roads straight because it’s cheaper.

ELLIOTT KALAN: He’s technically not an engineer, Roman. He calls himself an engineer. He’s technically not.

ROMAN MARS: That’s right.

ELLIOTT KALAN: No training.

ROMAN MARS: That’s right. No training as an engineer. But basically, that straight line crazy– That idea that a straight line is the perfect way to solve and cut through these things. But the Cross Bronx Expressway, in this one mile, has this kind of swerve in it that seems to put it more in the path of more people than is necessary. And it’s just a very interesting sort of, like… The foundation of this whole chapter is this sense that none of this had to happen. Even if Moses was following his own kind of–I don’t know–normal behavior or logical sense, all of this tragedy could be avoided. But for some reason, he doesn’t. I mean, later on, we kind of learn maybe the reason that he doesn’t, but–

ELLIOTT KALAN: But you’re right that part of the horror of this chapter is that it seems irrational. And I feel like this often happens in politics nowadays. It feels like there are two choices, and one of the choices is so incredibly obviously better than the other. And yet, it doesn’t happen for some reason–through some irrational, emotional reason or some quirk of the specific situation. And yet, you’re right. Running through this whole chapter, it’s like, “there’s obviously a better route for this road that would not affect so many people.” And he’s not taking it, and it’s so out of the ordinary for him that he’s not. It seems like, in this case, it should be a chapter about “In one case, Moses’ rules for road building also matched up with what was best for the neighborhood. It would go through here, across Parkland.” But he’s just not doing it this way. And it’s very strange. And so, this part of the road could go across the top of, uh… Was it Crotona Park, I think? But instead, it goes north. There’s this bulge that takes it through the heart of a neighborhood called East Tremont in the Bronx.

And we remember from Chapter 25, way back in Episode Six, he’s talking about the neighborhood of Third Avenue in Brooklyn–the one that was destroyed by the elevated highway that went over it. Here, he’s kind of talking about this neighborhood in similar terms–what once was there and what a home and a community was. This is a predominantly Jewish neighborhood. These are the people who were lucky enough to get out of the Lower East Side but not successful enough to go to Riverdale or the Grand Concourse–the kind of fancier parts of the Bronx. But here they could find this kind of clean, safe, comfortable, but not luxurious, lower middle class life. These are the Jewish New Yorkers who are still working in the garment trade, but they are saving the money for their kids to go to college so that they can become ensconced in the middle class. I mean, some could see it probably as–I don’t know–cloying or kind of sugary, but he really pours it on about what a nice neighborhood it is, how easy it’s for the people to live there and feel like they’re in a community, how you’re walkable to the Bronx Zoo, the Botanic Garden… There’s no playgrounds there, but you’re there with places to take kids. The elderly people there–they like to sit on benches–they can socialize. There’s a couple generations of people there who are considering it their home. And a lot of this comes from him talking to former residents, who are– At times, I’m like, “Maybe they’re looking at it through rose-colored glasses,” because if I know anything about Jewish neighborhoods–being Jewish and having lived in them–there’s a lot of arguments going on and there’s a lot of loud yelling. But it’s a shabby but safe, secure place.

And there’s something I want to talk about here. I think one of the reasons this chapter hits me so hard is me being Jewish and this being a Jewish neighborhood. And I think one of the reasons it hits Caro so hard possibly is because he is also Jewish. And I think people reading this book in 1974 would pick up on the fact that being evicted, being pushed out, trying to find a home, and being unable to is very much part of the eternal Jewish experience–but also especially the 20th century Jewish experience. People reading this book, many of them might have experienced maybe living in New York after having experienced the worst time to be Jewish in the history of the world. And Caro, later on, is literally quoting dialogue from Fiddler on the Roof. So, he’s really hitting it hard later on. And I wonder if it hits Gentiles the same way. I don’t know.

ROMAN MARS: Well, speaking for the Gentile community…

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, Roman, I’ve taken on the mantle of Judaism. Tell me what it’s like for non-Jews.

ROMAN MARS: I mean, I still think it’s quite accurate. I do think that when you are ensconced in a culture, those residences and harmonies and stuff are just built into the stories, which I don’t share. But one of the things that Caro does is, I think, he paints a picture that anyone can understand. And what he’s very clear on is that Moses looks at the same space and views it as tenements and slums and doesn’t see the value in it and doesn’t see why you can’t just bulldoze it. And having lived mostly in normally shabby places that I considered my home, that I understand. “This means something to me. This is a good place for me that maybe somebody else can’t see.” People think, “Oh, this place seems dangerous.” “And I don’t know how to explain it to you, but this is my home. I don’t feel fear here. I feel fine here.” And that I can certainly relate to. And one of the things–when you think about the value of what is lost–is when he talks about the rents that people are paying.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Oh my God. I mean, I was talking about kind of wealth porn in the last chapter. This is the opposite of that, which is low rent porn. They’re like, “For a four-room apartment, this family pays $62 a month. For a six-room apartment, this family pays $69 a month.” And this is in the Bronx. It’s not in the heart of the ritzy parts of the city. But you just read it, and you’re like, “Oh, why can’t I go back in time with regular money from now?” When I first had my first apartment in New York–this was in 2002– I lived on First Street and Avenue A. And it was two bedrooms and a kitchenette, and there were three of us in it. And it cost us all together $1,475 a month. And so I was paying $425 a month–a little more than $425 a month. And I was like, “What a steal. This is amazing.” So, to read it and be like, “Oh my God, less than $70 a month for these enormous apartments.” I mean, again, I guess you just have to keep it in the context of the times because this is also the late ’40s, early ’50s.

ROMAN MARS: But he does give the average wage. And when you compare them, it seems to equate to maybe one week of a month’s worth of wage to pay for that apartment, which is still a pretty good ratio. That’s a healthier ratio than most people have to deal with in most cities.

ELLIOTT KALAN: That’s true.

ROMAN MARS: To think that when you lose that, it’s not like you just lose a location and you can go somewhere else. What you lose is the opportunity to ever have a place with that lower rent ever again.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Oh yeah.

ROMAN MARS: They’ll never be able to get back on that same train that they were on if they get off here when their apartment is destroyed.

ELLIOTT KALAN: These are families where their finances are so precise–what they’re paying for this apartment is what they can afford to pay. And Caro talks about how if you’re a woman with a family, maybe your husband gets sick and misses a little bit of work–now you can’t afford the rent. And you slide back down to the Lower East Side to where the true tenements are. It’s not like the people living in the apartments are like, “These apartments are so cheap! Look at all the money we have to spend on other things now.” This is what their level is. And so, yeah, if they lose these apartments, they’re losing a standard of living–and they’re losing a community that they cannot ever find again, for the most part.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. Yeah. So, this part of the story when Caro was talking about this neighborhood is where some of it and the language of the prose gives me pause. In sort of exalting in the greatness of this easy to live in, cheap neighborhood that has a good community–a strong community–he basically puts that against a neighborhood that is failing because of blight and urban blight and uses his words like “slums.” And there’s something about the way that he’s presenting why this works–that the backbone of this Jewish community knows how to take care of its neighborhood and that there’s this other community nearby which does not. I feel like having read this book and several other books by Robert Caro and talked to him, I know his heart as a progressive and person who cares about the oppressed. But the language of this does not comport with how I would like people to talk about underserved neighborhoods today.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, I agree. He talks about the idea that there are neighborhoods to the south of the park that are–yes–slum neighborhoods. And there’s this constant fear and also struggle to hold back the blight of those neighborhoods from moving up through the park to this neighborhood–to turning it from no longer being kind of a good poor neighborhood into a bad poor neighborhood. And in doing that, he definitely speaks about blight and slums almost as if they were– You get the sense it’s almost, like, this kind of inhuman evil fog or stain that can spread and engulf other things. And it’s hard to read it now and not feel a racial element to it–a class element to it–things that, I think, were even at the time still baked in but are at cross purpose to the sense I have of Robert Caro’s own beliefs and his own feelings. And I wonder if it’s more a matter of–which is rare for him–kind of insensitivity to the specifics of the language he’s using rather than a real intention to label the people who are in those situations as trouble. But he’ll talk about vagrants and things like that. And there is a real sense, in those passages, that he is talking about kind of worthy people and unworthy people, which is a painful thing to read. When you read it, you get a twinge of, like, “Ugh, I don’t like that. That’s not good.”

ROMAN MARS: But I think the reason why there’s some dehumanizing sense of it is, I think, he does dehumanize it as a condition. He’s not saying that poor people are wrong or a certain type of poor people is wrong. He’s saying that the sin here is poverty in general. But the language is, I think, just imprecise here. You have to imagine when this book is being published in 1974…

ELLIOTT KALAN: Happy Birthday–50 years–Power Broker.

ROMAN MARS: [chuckles] Exactly. But the idea that urban blight is this monster that could take over and swallow New York à la Escape from New York–

ELLIOTT KALAN: Or Hedorah, the Smog Monster, from Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster. Yeah.

ROMAN MARS: It’s a way that people thought about things and is very prominent. And he’s speaking to these things. He’s like, “You cannot think of this as a plighted, poor neighborhood that is not functional. This is a good neighborhood, even though it’s poor.” And he’s trying to make that point. And in making that point, he commits, I think, some sort of dismissal of these other poor neighborhoods that are not as worthy of preservation or care or lifting up and whose condition is because of outside forces–not necessarily inside forces. And just taking a point to recognize that that dysfunction is the fault of people who are not living in it.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, it’s not the fault of the residents but the fault of the people who are making the larger decisions, which I think is the larger message of the book. But in the writing, it does come up. It does start to feel as if there’s a Barbarians at the Gates-type attitude, which–

ROMAN MARS: Exactly. And I think a lot of that is also probably the language of the people who he’s interviewing. He’s taking on some of that empathically and not checking it. It’s just something to think about here that is worth sort of taking head on versus just letting it go. I mean, I think of this as an extremely progressive text. I think of it as a very important text that is about telling the stories and taking care of people who are ignored in history, whereas most people write the history of Robert Moses through the greatness of Robert Moses. That’s certainly how he would wish it was written. And so, the overall intent, I think, is super heartfelt and meaningful. But I just have some misgivings about some of the way that this is presented. I would say mild misgivings about the way that it’s presented.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Not spicy misgivings. And not to belabor it, but when we were talking about this before recording, Roman, you had mentioned also–which I wasn’t even thinking about–that when this book came out, New York was in bad shape. New York was in rough, rough shape. So, the idea of blight and the city deteriorating and rotting was something that was very much on people’s minds. This was the period when– I mean, reading the book, it sounds like New York never had any money to do anything. But this is when New York really didn’t have any money. And I think the way that he would describe– If this book was written now with 50 more years of New York’s history, it would be a different framing and a different way of looking at it because the city now is so different than the city of 50 years ago.

ROMAN MARS: It is kind of amazing. The fact that in the subtitle is The Fall of New York… I think that’s a subtitle that can only exist in this narrow window of a few years. And so, I think that a lot of that discussion has to do with that time that it was published and the fact that he’s really putting his chips on this is the type of neighborhood–East Tremont–that should be preserved because of all these sort of connections he feels with it and the people he’s talked to. So, anyway– but what he does find when he’s there are these folks who, because they form these communities in East Tremont, have a little bit of fight in them to stop this. And this is where a lot of the heartbreak is because you get the sense that they could stop this from happening, but they cannot.

ELLIOTT KALAN: You get the sense that, in a properly functioning democracy, these people would’ve had their voices heard and been able to save their homes. In the Hollywood movie version of this, they’re able to save their homes. Spoiler alert–we’ll get to it–nobody saves their homes. So, it starts out–he’s talked more in general about East Tremont. And then there’s a little space between paragraphs. And then there’s this one-sentence paragraph, which just says, “The letters came on December 4th, 1952.” One day after my birthday–many years before I was born–but still. The East Tremonters–they know there’s an expressway coming their way. They’ve been hearing about it for so long. And it’s been so long that nothing has happened that they kind of don’t worry about it. They’re not thinking– It’s like climate change. They’re like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’ve been hearing about it. It’ll get to us someday. I guess so.” And then they figure, “It’s obviously going to go along the edge of the park. That’s the best place for it. Why wouldn’t they put it there?”

But they get these letters signed by Robert Moses, city construction coordinator, saying that where they live is needed for the Cross Bronx Expressway, and they have 90 days to move. And one of the residents, Lillian Edelstein–who will become a major figure in this chapter–she says, “It was like the floor opened up underneath your feet.” To get a letter in the mail saying, “You have 90 days. You have to leave your home,” and there’s no way to push back against it– And the thing is, that deadline–that 90-day deadline–is incredibly arbitrary. Moses does not even have the money to get the title to the land yet. He doesn’t even have the money to get the land and build on it. And he secretly is like, “Yeah, it’s going to be about 18 months before the area is going to be clear of people.” But he wants to scare them. He wants to make them feel like it’s got to be done now–get out of here.

And people panic, and they start looking for new apartments. And New York is in this post-World War II housing crunch. A lot of people are returning from the war. There hasn’t been a lot of construction during the war because all the resources were going to the war. And so, there’s not enough places for people to live. So, they can’t find apartments that they can afford that are anywhere near what they had been living in for most of their lives.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. The reason the floor is opening up underneath them is they know how precarious it is and how good they have it in this one spot and that it will not be replicated anywhere else. Again, this is a weird personal story, but when the twins were born in Chicago, we got kicked out of our apartment a few weeks after they were born. And they didn’t kick us out, they just took down the fire escape and began demolishing other parts of the apartment. And I had to move three times in the first year of their life in Chicago. And you feel like you are under siege in these situations; if you can’t rest in your home, it is like a war crime to me. And that’s what these people felt. And I totally empathize with this.

ELLIOTT KALAN: That’s exactly the situation that they’re dealing with here. It’s really intense, and it’s very scary. And so, people are panicking. They want to reassure the residents. So, another letter goes out, and it says, “Hey, you’re in Section Two of the construction map. Section Three–we already have been relocating tenants starting in 1946, and it went fine.” And the Section Two people are like, “Uh, let’s form a committee and go over there and see what it’s like.” And what they find horrifies them. I’m just going to read a tiny bit of this. It’s another classic Caro urban dystopia cataclysm writing. He says, “Where once apartment buildings or private homes had stood were now hills of rubble, decorated with ripped open bags of rotting garbage that had been flung atop them. Some of the right of way was being cleared. Giant wrecker’s balls thudded into walls. Mammoth cranes snarled and grumbled over the ruins, picking out their insides. Huge bulldozers and earth-moving machines rumbled over the rubble. A small army of grime-covered demolition workers pounded and pried and shoveled. A thick layer of gritty soot made the very air feel dirty. ‘I took out a handkerchief and wiped my forehead, and it came away black–absolutely black,’ Mrs. Edelstein says. Over the rumble of the bulldozers came the staccato, machine gun-like banging of jackhammers and occasionally the dull concussion of an exploding dynamite charge. And in the midst of this landscape of destruction, a handful of apartment buildings still stood.” And they go into these buildings, and the places are wrecked. They’re just in shambles. They’re filthy. And they’ll knock on doors, and they’ll find families like themselves still living in these apartments because they have not been relocated. And if they have been, they’ve been relocated to the next building down the line that is about to be destroyed. It’s like something out of a Franz Kafka or a Philip K. Dick story that’s like, “You’re being relocated. One building down.” And then the building you were just in gets destroyed. “You’re being relocated again. The building you’re in now is being destroyed.” They’re living out of suitcases, kind of being moved from building to building–these people in Section Three. And each time they move, they get hit by a 15% rent bump, which is the thing that always astonishes me the most. They still have to pay rent, and they’re getting charged more to live in this kind of nightmare land. And Section Three is like, “Oh yeah, we got the same assurances that you guys got in Section Two.”

There’s this Tenant Relocation Bureau, but the apartments found were worse and more expensive. And the Bureau basically says, “Well, you’re on your own. If you move now, we’ll give you some money to cover your moving costs if you move into one of these worst apartments that’s more expensive.” And people start to swallow their dignity and say, “What about public housing? They’re building all this public housing. We’ve never wanted to be on assistance. There’s a stigma attached to it, but can we– What about that?” And they’ll be like, “Uh, the waiting list is tens of thousands of people long.” And this one woman in Section Three is like, “Yeah, I’ve been on one of the waiting lists for public housing for six years.” And they feel like there’s no way to go. They’ve journeyed from Section Two to Section Three–the people of East Tremont–and they’ve seen this horrible glimpse of their future. And they need to do whatever they can to not be in this situation where their neighborhood is being torn down around them while they struggle to find a new place to live. It’s like a real-life urban equivalent of someone coming back from the Terminator world and being like, “Don’t let this happen!”

ROMAN MARS: Exactly. Exactly. So, they do what all good liberals do. Maybe they’re liberals. Maybe they’re not. But they say, “You know what? We just can make a logical case to the people involved. And if we just have the right argument, we can convince them that they’re wrong and they should save this neighborhood.”

ELLIOTT KALAN: We’ve seen it time and again. It works every time in this book. “As long as we can just sit down with the man–just sit down and explain our feelings and our situation–of course he’ll see the truth!” Oh boy. Oh, these poor liberals. They are liberals. These are, like, ex-socialists and things like that. These are real hardcore– But what’s funny is they’re like, “Hey, maybe there’s an alternate road for this.” And they happen, by luck, to be kicked down the ladder to the one guy on the planning commission who was like, “Yeah, there is an alternate route. It should go through the park. It shouldn’t go through your homes.” And that person is told never to talk to them again.

ROMAN MARS: It’s so awful. He’s just low enough to not feel like the presence of Robert Moses in every moment of his waking life. And so, he looks at something with clear eyes–uninfluenced–and he goes, Yyeah, totally. This would be so much better if it was right here.” And then, as soon as he suggests it, all of a sudden the shadow of Moses–like the eye of Sauron–turns on him.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And they have to get an engineer who used to work for Moses but was kind of blackballed because he spoke his mind so many times–they have to get him to make plans for an alternate route that they can at least show to the city. But he goes, “I’ll only do it anonymously.” People are so afraid of Moses that they do not want to be putting their name on this. The new route they have–it’s nearly identical to the old one, except it avoids their homes, is less expensive, and would be easier to build. And they’re trying to get a meeting with Moses. And Moses’ office is like, “It’s not worth it. He’s never going to change it. He’s decided. The coordinator has decided on the route. He’s not going to change his mind.”

ROMAN MARS: And he’s right. But they keep on going through this. They keep on finding other people. And this is where they try to– You know, they think this is what democracy is for. “I’m going to talk to the borough president and see if they support us.” And mostly, when they meet with these people individually, they go, “Yeah, that doesn’t make sense. Yeah, I’ll support this change and present it.” But every time they present it to someone, it makes sense in the moment. But as soon as Moses has the ability to be around them or it comes up for some kind of vote, they forget the promises they once made to the community in East Tremont.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And the East Tremonters–they’re doing everything right. They form a neighborhood association. They’re lobbying their elected representatives. They are trying to get into the press. They’re doing everything, and they just simply– They’re not having no results. And it’s because of Moses. And there’s a thing that Moses says that really hits me hard because he is making that argument of, like, “No–because I don’t care–that means I’m the best person to talk about this.” And he says, “This route will be the backbone of traffic for centuries after a few objecting tenants have been removed from the scene. You have–” This is a letter he writes to the Bronx Borough President. “You have, from time to time, remarked that I do not have to be elected to office. Perhaps that is why I’m in a position to protect the really long-range public interest.” This idea that “because I’m not answerable to the public, that’s why I can do the hard things that have to be done even though people don’t like them…” And I’m like, “What is he, a Supreme Court Justice? What’s going on here, Moses?” Boom. Relevant. Relevant. And he pulls his tricks all the time of, “If you obstruct me, I’m going to take money away from your borough. I’m going to reveal things about you that you don’t want people to know.”

And, like you’re saying, in private, they will meet with the East Tremonters. And these are mostly women from East Tremont. And this is the early 1950s. These are women who are not used to taking a public role in something. And they’re finding this strength and this courage to go from up in the Bronx down to City Hall–a place that they’ve never imagined they would have reason to go to–to talk to these very powerful people and say, “You need to help us save our homes.” And they’ll be like, “Of course. Of course.” And then, it just doesn’t happen. Moses’ route is just kind of going through the process without really any obstruction.

“And in theory,” Caro says, “East Tremont–the people there–they could have slowed it down with a legal battle.” But lawyers cost money. They don’t have that money. None of them are lawyers. They’re not educated people. They’re garment workers. And so, they can’t do the work themselves. And later on we’re going to see a successful fight with Moses. And the difference there is the people fighting him are upper middle class people who have access to money. Some of them are lawyers. They have access to the press in a way that ordinary people–the people of East Tremont–do not. And they feel like it’s hopeless, but they still fight.

And Lillian Edelstein really becomes one of these civic heroes that shows up in the book, where she’s doing things she’s never done before. Like, she’s teaching herself how to type and run a mimeo machine. She’s teaching herself how to run a local publicity campaign. She’s arranging rallies. She’s chartering buses. Things that she’s never thought she’d had to do–she’s doing now. But enthusiasm just keeps falling. It’s hard because they keep hitting failure after failure after failure. But Roman, there’s one person who seems to have been listening to them. Who is it? Who could be their potential savior in this situation?

ROMAN MARS: It’s Robert F. Wagner Jr. This is before he’s the mayor. We talked about him as the mayor a couple chapters ago.

ELLIOTT KALAN: So, if this was a Marvel comic, there’d be an asterisk that would say, “Takes place between Impy and Wagner in Chapter 34! -Smilin’ Stan”–something like that.

ROMAN MARS: That’s right. So, right now, he’s the Manhattan Borough President and part of the Board of Estimate. And also, right now, he is about to run for mayor. So, he sees all these people–these potential voters, of which there are many. I mean, you’re talking about 1,500 apartments. That’s at least 1,500 voters and probably more like 3,000 to 5,000 voters.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s something around 5,000 people, Caro makes it sound like. So, yeah, it’s not enough to, like, win an election. But it’s enough to swing an election–probably–in a close one. You want those people.

ROMAN MARS: So, at some point, he promises them that he will hold off any approval of the condemnation of their different properties and stuff. And he kind of, like… I’m trying to think if this crests over to when he’s the mayor. Does it?

ELLIOTT KALAN: It does. So, he’s the Manhattan Borough President, and he says, “Yes.” And on the campaign, he says, “I will not approve this route. I will not vote for this route.”

ROMAN MARS: That’s right.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And he makes a real promise–a public promise about it. And Moses pulls the same stuff he always pulls where he goes, “Hey. This is being built with federal and state money, and I represent those officials.” And I think it’s amazingly telling that he says, “I represent those officials.” He does not represent the people of New York. He represents the money brokers that he’s dealing with. He goes, “And if you try to move this, you’re not going to get the money for this road and you’re not going to get the money from the state or the federal government that you want ever again.” And Wagner as mayor–he tries to drag it out as long as he can. And the deputy mayor offers his support, too. And there are moments of hope, and then they’re undermined. And they study an alternate route, but it turns out Moses’ staff studied the wrong route on purpose. And in the end, it doesn’t matter.

Moses applies his pressure. The deputy mayor switches sides. Everyone on the board–including Mayor Wagner–votes to approve the condemnation of East Tremont, even though he has been on the record first saying, “I will not vote for this unless these people are relocated first,” and then saying, “I will not vote for this.” But then he does it. And the East Tremonters meet with the mayor, and they go, “What’s going to happen to us?” And he’s like, “Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going to happen to you.” They’ve been completely sold out, and they can’t understand why. But the mayor has been assured that an efficient private firm–the Nassau Management Company–will handle their relocations. So don’t worry. I guess they’re in good hands.

And years later, Caro says– He talks to Moses, and he wants to know why did Epstein change his vote. The Deputy Mayor Epstein–why did he change his vote, which led to the mayor also changing his vote? And Caro makes a notice of saying that nobody remembers this vote. And when he talks to the deputy mayor’s–who at this point had died–widow, she’s like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t have any idea what this is.” But Moses remembers. And he says, “He was hit over the head with an axe, but I won’t tell you what we did to him.” But in his words, he seems to be hinting that they were maybe going to reveal an affair that Epstein was having or insinuate that he was having an affair. And Caro says, “What about the difficulties of all these people–of building it?” And Moses says, “There are more people in the way. That’s all.” And talking about the people of East Tremont, he says, “It was a political thing that stirred up the animals there.” And he has no regrets, doesn’t care, and does not see those people as people. And one of the shattering things is that the New York Times reports on this story basically not at all. But the one time they do is when the route gets approved. And it’s just noting that after years of delay, the Cross Bronx will finally finish its construction, like this is a victory for the Cross Bronx Expressway and for the city. And it comes after this long–We’ve really done a kind of brisk summary of it–story of these people trying and trying and and doing all the right things and all the things you’re supposed to do in a democracy to save your home. And it just doesn’t matter. And the people in power are mostly deaf to them. And even when they seem to be hearing them, they bow to the other pressures. Moses–he’s got the power. And these people do not have that power.

ROMAN MARS: So then Caro tries to spend a moment here to go, like, “Well, why did this have to happen at all? Why did this bump out have to happen? Why did the alternate route not be chosen? That seems straighter. That seems like it would displace far fewer people.”

ELLIOTT KALAN: It would cost much less money. That’s money he could spend on other roads. He loves building roads. He doesn’t like to waste money.

ROMAN MARS: And the people fighting it had heard rumors that maybe the Tremont bus depot was necessary to preserve–all kinds of things.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Maybe the Bronx Borough President had a relative that owned land there. Nobody really knows for sure. And the rumors sound… I mean, Caro seems to lean on the bus one a little bit, but the rumors sound like rumors. They sound like someone desperately trying to figure out, from a nip of something they heard from a neighbor, what it might possibly be. It’s something that I know Caro hates doing, which is being like, “Yeah, we don’t know. We don’t know why he did it.”

ROMAN MARS: But what it comes down to and what Caro sort of settles on is that it doesn’t matter–the reasons don’t matter in the real world because the reasons don’t really matter to Moses. What Moses wants is what Moses goes after, and that’s it. That’s the end of it. He doesn’t like to be questioned.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah. The reason Moses did it is less important than the fact that only Moses’ reason was the important one. Whatever reason he had–whether it was a whim, whether he was like, “I think I’m going to try a slanty line this time, I’m going to put a curve in my road, I’m tired of straight lines”–it doesn’t matter. Whatever he felt was the only factor that was important in the decision. And Caro says, “Neighborhood feelings, urban planning considerations, cost, aesthetics, common humanity, common sense–none of these mattered in laying out the routes of New York’s great roads. The only consideration that mattered was Robert Moses’ will.” And it should go without saying that we’re going to talk about this more, I guess, in the next chapter possibly. But it goes without saying that the Nassau Management Company, which gets millions of dollars in relocation contracts in the city, is controlled by three of Moses’ key aides and, we’ll see, is terrible. It’s very bad at what it does bad. It’s just another corruption thing.

And there’s a black line here that separates sections of the chapter, which is another thing he doesn’t do that often. Every now and then, Robert Caro would throw in a little formatting trick that you don’t expect to see. And he’s doing it because he wants to introduce a quote, which he doesn’t usually do, which is this section of dialogue from Fiddler on the Roof, which is the moment when the characters–the Jewish residents of the Shtetl of Anatevka– I could go into it more detail. It’s a show that is very important to me. The moment when they realize they are being evicted from their homes, they’ve received a piece of paper. It’s a letter from the Czar saying you have to leave. And he’s so explicitly comparing the relocation of these tenants to the expulsion of the Jews from the pale of settlement–the area of Russia that Jews were allowed to live in and then were told, “No, you can’t live in here anymore.” And it’s the expulsion that led many of the families in this chapter to come to the United States in the first place. It’s the kind of expulsion that led my family to come here in the first place. And so, as an East Coast, Fiddler on the Roof-loving, Jewish guy with Eastern European roots in his family, this parallel just hits me so hard.

And there’s a certain added aspect that I think Caro doesn’t go into–but the idea that there’s this kind of tribalism that should not play a part in politics–but that Moses is a Jew who is doing this to fellow Jews is a little bit of extra bad. He should know of anyone because this is something that, if he felt any sense of community with these people–which he doesn’t–he would be aware of. But it’s just a moment where it feels like Caro was going out of his way to create a parallel between an explicitly non-democratic moment as well. Moses is not just acting like a dictator or whatever. He’s acting specifically like the czar of Russia, which is the kind of thing that America is not supposed to have or do at all. And it strikes me, especially, as it’s not a connection I expect Caro expected anyone to make because they didn’t know exactly which books and musicals I had seen and read. But Moses is comparing himself earlier to Lincoln. And Lincoln said at one point–specifically used Russia as an example–that if slavery is legal in the United States, then all the things that America says about equality and freedom and democracy are false. It’s all hypocrisy. And he would rather live in a place like Russia then, which does not have the “base alloy of hypocrisy,” as he calls it, and is open about the fact that it is a kingdom run by a czar–unlike the United States, which purports to be something different.

And so, it’s just Caro here is making these connections and swimming in these waters especially hard in this chapter–this idea that Moses is, in the chapter about R.M., the fun loving party thrower. He is a king in the fun way. And here, he is a czar in the bad way where he is throwing people out of their houses.

ROMAN MARS: And if you thought the other part was heartbreaking, this is, in a way, where the misery really begins–when they finally decide that this is the end of this neighborhood. And as hinted at, the Nassau Management Company is not really up to the task. Its office is located far away. Its business hours are, like, maybe a couple hours a day, he mentions. And so people go there and find that the apartments that they’re offering people to be placed in are far worse than the ones they came from. There are long lines of people waiting for them. And then the women show up to go look at them, and they’ll go, “Well, if none of these people are going to take it, it must be so awful that I wouldn’t want to take it either.”

ELLIOTT KALAN: They’ll get sent to apartments that have people living in them already–that are not even vacant. It’s another kind of Kafkaesque moment where Moses is like, “You know what I could use to crush people? Bureaucracy. I can send them running in circles. Try to call the office. You can’t, the phone’s busy. Try to show ’em in person. You can’t. The door’s locked. It’s closed. Okay, you got an apartment address from us? Surprise. It’s terrible.” And it’s leaving them with no place to turn at the exact time that, now that Moses has the ability to take control of these buildings, he is physically making it so incredibly undesirable and uncomfortable to live there to push them out. So, January 1st, 1954, he takes over these buildings, turns off the heat, turns off the hot water… And Roman, I know you live in northern California where it’s kind of chilly sometimes, but January in New York can get very cold.

ROMAN MARS: Very cold.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah. It’s not a time when you don’t want heat or hot water. And it’s not like they can find it too many other places. It’s the 1950s. There’s not that many places to go to stay warm at the time if you don’t have money to spend. And on May 1st of that year, the residents are sent notices warning them to move out by the end of month or they’ll be evicted. These are false notices. They have no legal backing. It’s just more of this scare tactic. And so, families start to move. There are elderly widows that are trying to last as long as they can, but they start getting scattered to various public housing projects. There’s this part that is so sad where it’s these elderly couples that have met later in life. They’re not married, but they are in love. And they can’t get apartments in the same public housing projects. The system is just not set up that way. And so they’re just kind of scattered around the city, and they’re too poor to afford carfare to see each other. And so, these elderly people are just never going to see their friends or their loved ones again.It’s just not going to happen. They’re going to live alone and lonely. Oh, it’s so sad. It’s so incredibly sad.

ROMAN MARS: I mean, that’s something that Caro pointed out in our interview–that the loneliness was what struck him the most of people’s lives. That was the saddest part. They didn’t really harp on the physical structures they lost or anything like that. It was really about that loneliness of being isolated. And yeah, sure, they have a place to live. Maybe they landed on their feet and found a place to live that was too expensive for them. But they never got back that sense of community and connection with other people.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Something that has always struck me about the work of 99% Invisible–a really wonderful podcast about architecture and design that I love–is that you often… Or you and the reporters who work on it–all the great amazing staff of reporters and editors and writers, etc.

ROMAN MARS: Mostly them at this point. Yes. [chuckles]

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah. As absentee landlord Roman Mars goes on his Power Broker jaunts, there’s a real emphasis on the emotional impact often of infrastructure, of architecture, and of living. And it’s very easy for official organizations to put a lot of emphasis on the money something costs, the amount of work that has to be put into it, the amount of cars that can be moved per hour or per day through a space, and the amount of money you can raise in tolls without putting the emphasis that deserves to be there on the emotional cost of something because it’s harder to quantify and it’s easier to dismiss because it’s an individual thing. But that loneliness–Caro hits it and that this isn’t just a matter of people living in more rundown apartments than before. But yeah, this is a matter of their feeling of security in the world taking a hit, their feeling of living in a place where they know the people and have relationships with them being hit, and their sense that they have any sort of control over their lives in this world being hit. I am glad that Caro also looks at it from the point of view of how are these people feeling about it and getting that across, because, in many ways, it’s so devastating. I feel lucky I’ve never been thrown out of my home, but I’ve been lonely. I know what it’s like to be lonely. And to live that way every day with no end in sight–it’s so horrifying. It’s a nightmare.

ROMAN MARS: And they just bungle everything about this in terms of taking care of these people–I mean–not that his intention was ever to take care of these people.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, I feel like “bungle” implies that they were trying and they failed out of incompetence, whereas they’re trying to do it on the cheap and with as little effort as possible.

ROMAN MARS: But they keep claiming success, which is infuriating. And probably it keeps on being reported as a success. At a certain point–at the end of that year–the Nassau management announces that “in less than 10 months, we have relocated 90% of the 1,530 occupants of Section Two,” which is a lie?

ELLIOTT KALAN: I mean, they’ve moved out. I mean, they weren’t relocated by the management company because, at this point, also, as soon as people start moving out, they start tearing those buildings out. And they’re tearing apart buildings while people are still living in them. If the top floor gets vacated completely–it doesn’t matter if they’re people living on the next floor–they’ll just start ripping the top floor off. And so, it becomes this self-sustaining cycle of people who tried to stay have to leave because their buildings are being destroyed around them.

And this once comfortable neighborhood–not comfortable in a rich sense, but comfortable in you felt safe and you felt home there–suddenly it is just rubble. The rubble gets lit on fire. Crime starts to go through. Vandals come in. He talked about how one mother finds her sons jumping back and forth over a hole 20 feet deep because the basements of these buildings that are no longer there are just open pits full of debris that they don’t even put fences around. It’s another one of these, again, more urban dystopia stuff, where it’s just, like, rats and glass all over the floor. That’s the thing. It’s, like, rats, glass, and dust everywhere. And I don’t know if you’ve ever read the book The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner. It’s a science fiction, kind of ecological catastrophe, horror, and satire novel. And it’s the only book I can think of that comes close to my feeling reading this. And that’s one where it’s extrapolating into the future world where the environment has just collapsed and everyday life is a nightmare–just this idea of, “Yeah, anyway, I’m just trying to still live in my neighborhood. They won’t push me out, but everything is rats and glass and dust and vandalism.” And so, yeah, by the end, they haven’t necessarily relocated 90% in a good way, but they’ve certainly pushed them out. And that’s a victory that the Nassau Management Company is happy to announce.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, so that’s the story of one mile of the Cross Bronx Expressway. And that leads us to the next chapter. It is the afterword of the previous chapter. Mostly you have afterwards when you’re talking about a whole book. But apparently, this chapter is itself kind of its own sort of dystopian novel. And so it has an afterward. What is going on here, Elliott? Why do we have an afterward for the previous chapter we just read?

ELLIOTT KALAN: This is an interesting question because, as you mentioned, afterwards are usually for whole books. It’s like putting an epilogue in the middle of a novel and being like, “This is the epilogue for that last chapter.” And you’re like, “Well, why didn’t you just make it the next chapter or part of the previous chapter?” And I think he is doing it for dramatic and structural effect but also because there’s a little bit of a pun there, maybe, that he’s literally talking about what happened afterward–what happened after that chapter. And I think he wants to… It’s actually, I think, really masterful that, in that One Mile chapter, he is taking you through the experience of being a resident of that neighborhood as it is taken from them. And in this next chapter, he can kind of zoom out a little bit and instead look at it from the point of view of numbers and facts and figures and the consequences of what happened.

ROMAN MARS: That’s right. This is about how the fact that it isn’t just all those people being moved out that destroyed that neighborhood. The fact of this highway dividing this section of the Bronx destroyed this neighborhood in a way that was beyond removing those 1,500 families.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes, it is the continuing tragedy that happens after that construction. I guess that’s a great way to think about it–that this afterward is a little bit his way of saying, “Everything is after this. And it doesn’t end. It doesn’t stop.” It’s not like, “Well, we had to break some eggs to build that road, but now the road is here.”

ROMAN MARS: “And everything functions great as I intended.”

ELLIOTT KALAN: “It’s wonderful. And you know what?” Chapter 38: One Mile Afterward–and it just starts with, “And he was right. The road was great. And everybody loved it.” I mean, that’s not going to happen when the chapter previous to the last one was The Meat Axe. People don’t title the chapter as Meat Axe when good things happen at the end. So, it’s November, 1955. The tenants have been rushed out of their homes. Time to build that highway–when the money comes through. They don’t have it at the moment. It turns out traffic’s going to be heavier than expected, so they got to build some new bridges, too. And you know what? We’re going to finish trying to finish some other stuff sooner in time for the ’58 gubernatorial election. So, this road where it was so important that these people be kicked out of their homes because construction had to start in 90 days–it isn’t finished until 1973. The East Tremont section isn’t complete until 1960, so it takes five years after he throws everybody out to get the money and then build the road. And even if you like the road and you feel like they had to be kicked out, those are at least a couple of years that they might’ve been able to stay in their homes.

And this road is so expensive–the Cross Bronx project. Originally Moses was like, “Oh yeah, it’ll cost $47 million.” It ends up costing about $250 million, which is amazing. But he says that only 5,000 people were evicted from East Tremont. It’s not like the whole neighborhood was kicked out. There are still 55,000 East Tremonters who did not need to leave their homes. They get to stay–wonderful. Everything will be fine for them as a massive road is dug deep into the earth, right under their windows. And they have to deal with the consequences of the stuff that we were reading about earlier with Section Three. An expressway is going through their neighborhood, so it’s the demolition noise, jackhammers drilling, blasting, and the ground is shaking. The buildings they’re in they haven’t been evicted from. The buildings are not condemned, but the walls are starting to break. And fissures are opening up in the floors because the buildings are shaking. Buildings shift to the point that they are unsafe to live in. And there’s dust everywhere. There’s dirt everywhere. The residents start to call it “fallout.” They talk about how, if you sit in a chair in your apartment, you will be covered in dust and dirt. You wake up in the morning, and you’re covered in dust and dirt. It sounds so incredibly disgusting. The idea that if you stop moving, dirt just settles all over you–it’s horrifying. It’s so gross. But at least you can still go about normal life, even though this expressway is going through your neighborhood, right? You can still do your normal stuff?

ROMAN MARS: Not at all. You can’t do anything. And even after it’s done, the way that– And this is something we talked about with AOC. The way that this divides and sort of makes what used to be a neighborhood not function by having this split in it is just devastating. But it’s a little bit more slow motion devastating–the basic functioning doesn’t work. But they also just, like… He talks about how you can hear the jackhammers and that’s one thing. And maybe the jackhammers go away. But then the amount of poison that these cars spit out–you just live with the carbon monoxide. And it makes people sick. It just makes everything worse and worse and worse and just degrades this neighborhood in a million ways beyond just destroying the apartments that were in the way of the road.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, it’s the idea that, when the construction finishes, the road is still making it a worse place to live. He mentions it; he goes, “People get nausea, they get headaches, they get dizziness for days, and then their bodies acclimate to the carbon monoxide,” which is, I think, one of the scariest parts of this book maybe to me–the idea that a human body is just like, “I guess I’ll just deal with all this poisonous gas going into me.” And you have no idea what other effects are going on because you’re no longer feeling the symptoms of it–that your body is just like, “Look, where you’re living is so unsafe that I’m just not even going to tell you about it anymore. I told you plenty through how bad you were feeling, and you didn’t go anywhere.” It’s just unbearable.

And more and more people move away. They’re replaced by poorer residents–mostly poor Black residents. And this is where some of that language starts coming in where, I think–to give Caro the benefit of the doubt–he is not trying to villainize the people moving in but is villainizing the forces that are breaking these neighborhoods down. A lot of those residents–he mentions–they move in and they’re taken advantage of by their landlords. They get charged much higher rents than the Jewish East Tremont people who are leaving. And the buildings are going unmaintained. And it’s really the people in positions of power that are allowing these buildings to deteriorate–that’s the kind of thing that Caro is saying invites vandalism, theft, and break-ins. And people are just moving away. Businesses are moving away because the insurance rates are going up so high. When you leave a boarded up storefront behind, that contributes to this feeling that the neighborhood is falling apart. And it creates the opportunity for more kind of trouble in the neighborhood.

And by 1962-1963, there are stories of horrible crimes being committed. One in particular–this assault of a teacher who is leading a class trip in the park and gets kidnapped and assaulted. And Caro cannot ascertain the truth of this story. He can’t really see if it actually happened. But the rumor of it is enough to drive more people out. Hey, there’s maybe some hope. In 1959, a new group of residents– Edelstein, the former champion in the neighborhood, has long since moved away. They have a way to save the neighborhood. “Look, what if we made this a Title I housing development project?” And they bring it to Moses, who oversees the Title One housing in the city. And he is like, “I like it. I approve of this project. But you know what? Instead of being a small, low-income project, let’s make this a 5,400 unit complex. It’s going to go in the space where the best apartment buildings that are still standing are. We’re going to tear those down, and we’ll put it in. And these will be middle-income rents, which is higher than the residents can pay.” And so it’s this sad thing of they agitated for a solution and the solution made things worse for them. And the residents–they try to use a different housing program that Moses doesn’t have control over. And they find land that the city owns. They find a private developer who will do the job. And the city is like, “Great.” It turns out that land is technically owned by the Triborough Authority.

ROMAN MARS: Oh no.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And they feel like there’s no way of fighting Moses. He controls everything. They’re helpless. More people are leaving. It’s just–every step–it’s terrible. Moses is behind every door. It’s like the story of the lady and the tiger, except it’s called The Tiger and the Tiger. All the doors have tigers behind them. There’s no good way to do it. It’s terrible.

ROMAN MARS: And so, this neglect by the powers that be–it creates more problems in the community and it just gets worse and worse because powerful people in charge have chosen this place to be abandoned. And there is no investment. It’s just a mess. But one of the things that’s interesting is that it’s really a testament to how these larger forces are the things that cause this type of effect in a neighborhood.

ELLIOTT KALAN: He makes a point in the previous chapter. He says, “This is the kind of neighborhood that works. And if you left it alone–even with the forces of blight that everyone’s worried about–it would keep working.” And when new people move into this neighborhood, they are brought into the neighborhood and assimilated into it and it works. And he says outright, “If you leave this neighborhood alone, it will survive.” And they don’t leave it alone, and it gets mangled. And by now, East Tremont is in a different place than it was 50 years ago. But it took many years of work–I’m assuming from authorities but also from the people living there.

ROMAN MARS: From the people living there, yeah.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Mostly from the people living there–to make it a place worth living in again.

ROMAN MARS: Things are made worse by the powers that be, and things are made better by a community sort of bucking against those trends.

ELLIOTT KALAN: This is why, Roman, I’m glad that we’re finally getting into the kind of hardcore libertarian sentiment that I feel like has always been an important part of 99PI. No, I hate to– I believe so much in the power of official work to make the world better for people. But the flip side of that is that power can be abused by a guy like Robert Moses to make life worse for people. And the balance of democracy has to be the balance between the people on the top and the people who are living on the level of the ground. And when that balance gets thrown off in either way, things can go wrong.

ROMAN MARS: But what’s important to just remember–

ELLIOTT KALAN: For the record–I just want to make sure people know–I don’t think there’s a hardcore libertarian theme running through 99PI.

ROMAN MARS: There is not. And mostly I like government that works, but I like them to work for the people.

ELLIOTT KALAN: You like a meat axe that is cutting up meat for people to enjoy when they’re hungry. You don’t like a meat axe that is cutting through homes.

ROMAN MARS: That’s right. But what roads do–roads like this that are meant to move people through a place and not in a place to move people out… So, one of the people we will talk to in this episode–Majora Carter–one of the things that she talks about in her writing and in her work is that the ultimate goal of someone who lives in a neighborhood that’s been abandoned by the powers that be is that you get to get out of that neighborhood, instead of staying in to build it and to make it better in different ways for the people who serve it, whose equity they can build, who can pass on, who can accrete and begin to grow the way that a lot of people have had that ability to build wealth… And usually real estate is the way people build wealth in this world. But when you have a place like this that’s undervalued and left behind but its inherent value could be so great, there’s people who come in and are predatory, don’t serve the public, and take it away. And it takes a real mindset change of being in a place, investing in a place, and thinking of it differently than as something to go through or get out of.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Or to look down on. There’s such a huge sense in this that Robert Moses looks down on these people, they are ants to him, his goals are more important than their goals, and his dreams are more important than their dreams. And the only way to do it properly, it does feel like, is to say to the people who live in a place, “What are your dreams? What are the things that would make your life better? Now, I’ll use expertise to make that possible,” as opposed to the expert coming in and saying, “Roads are great. And I like roads. And the best way to do it is to go straight through where you live.” And–it’s true–the Bronx is not the place it was in the 1970s. The Bronx is a great borough. I really love it. When I lived in New York, I wish that I went there more often. I usually did not have a reason. I had to invent reasons to go up there other than to go to the zoo, which I love. But my wife and I–we both have kind of family roots there of people who lived there a long time ago. And it’s a great borough. But when you go there and when you ride in the Cross Bronx Expressway, it does feel like you are riding through a scar that the borough has managed to heal past in many ways. But it’s still there. I’d like to say that it’s a C-section scar that’s left behind because of the birthing of a new and better world. It’s a symbol of the and the sacrifice that went into creating something great. But in reality, it seems like someone hit the Bronx with a meat axe. And the Bronx has healed, but the scar is still there. And it’s just very sad that that scar probably didn’t have to be there at all.

ROMAN MARS: I mean, I will clearly say it didn’t have to be there at all.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Eh, the jury is still out Roman. We got to wait till the evening to see how good the day has been. Let’s give it another 100, 200– When aliens arrive and the only way to defeat them is to march our troops down the Cross Bronx and that’s how we can get into the weak point of their ship, we’ll be glad that Moses did it–someday. I’m sure that was one of his plans. Yeah.

ROMAN MARS: These are a couple of really rough, dark chapters, where Moses at the height of his power. He’s also kind of the worst he is as a human. That happens a little bit more in the book. But I think by maybe the next episode or subsequent episodes, the Robert Moses Temple begins to crumble.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes. If you’ve been waiting for this guy to fall, he just keeps getting higher and higher in the power structure. And he never receives his comeuppance. By the end of the next episode, his uppance will begin to come. And then it’s all just tumbling down from that point. You’re going to start seeing him losing battles. You’re going to start seeing people not liking him. And I promise you this, listener, you will hear an episode–not next episode, but someday–when Robert Moses offers to resign and that resignation gets accepted. I promise you. You will get to hear that someday. So, don’t lose hope.

ROMAN MARS: Don’t lose hope. It is coming. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, so stick with us.

[AD BREAK]

ROMAN MARS: And now for a conversation with Majora Carter. Majora is another one of those people I knew I wanted to have on the show from the very beginning. The way she thinks about neighborhoods like the South Bronx, where she grew up, is directly antithetical to the way Moses viewed them. He saw them as places to move through as quickly as possible to get out of, and she sees them as places to stay.

MAJORA CARTER: My name is Majora Carter. And I am an urban revitalization strategist and also a real estate developer. And I’m from the South, South Bronx in New York.

ROMAN MARS: Well, let’s talk about first being from the South, South Bronx in New York City. You were born and raised and you continue to live in the South Bronx. Tell me about how Robert Moses has influenced your life.

MAJORA CARTER: Wow. Before I even knew of a Robert Moses, he was influencing my life because my neighborhood really did bear the scars of his handiwork. And I lived in an area that had a little piece of a highway in it that was never actually built but served to separate my community from itself and from the waterfront that, honestly, I didn’t know existed because that little highway was stuck there. There were years of financial disinvestment that came as a result of all sorts of things but, in particular–most notably in my lifetime–much of the fires that happened as a result of the financial disinvestment. Landlords were torching their buildings because there was no kind of money coming in because of redlining and the collaboration of the banking industry within that as well. Again, all kind of Robert Moses’ work played part and parcel to that. Did he cause all that? No. But did it exacerbate it all? Yes.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah.

MAJORA CARTER: 100%

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. So, let’s talk about one of those specific instances where this kind of abandoned bridge, like, clearing was this dumping ground that you helped turn into Hunts Point, Riverside Park. So, tell me about that story and when it happened and just the details of that.

MAJORA CARTER: Yeah, it was sort of funny. Growing up here in the South Bronx and feeling the impact of just how disinvested we were not just economically. But I also feel like it was almost a spiritual disinvestment that many people from our communities experienced because, especially during the era I grew up in, there was a lot of abandoned buildings that had been burned out as a result of the fires and also lack of financial investment in them as well. So, I grew up with that in my mind and literally worked to measure my success by how far I got away from my neighborhood with education.

I got myself into some great schools and swore never to come back except for my mother’s really, really good fried chicken. And so, I did often. But living here was not something I really wanted to do. But I had to because I was broke. And when I started graduate school and needed a cheap place to stay– And the cheapest place I knew was mommy and daddy’s house–my old bedroom–and that’s what I did. And it was then– Here I am going to school at NYU–not spending a whole lot of time here–and only got reconnected to my community because I discovered that there happened to be, in a part of the program I was in, this young man who had been working on opening an arts organization here. And that was an unbelievable discovery. It was literally two blocks away from my house. But through that, I started doing art stuff and having the time of my life and like, “Oh my gosh, there are actually people in my neighborhood who were super cool.” And so, that was fun.

But then, we discovered that there was this huge waste facility that was about to be placed on our waterfront thanks to the city’s rather discriminatory land use policies that continue to concentrate environmentally burdensome facilities and poor communities of color around New York City. And my neighborhood was one of those neighborhoods. And so, it was around that time when I understood that there wasn’t enough art in the world that was going to help our neighborhoods. And so, I really started looking for what we can do to create more of an opportunity for us to feel like our neighborhood had some kind of value because it was just, again, the spiritual disinvestment that I started this with. People felt like there was nothing you can do in our neighborhoods and that the best you can do was get out of it if you could. And that just felt weirdly wrong in every single way because it was just an admission. I was happy that I did have some education and some distance because that’s when I realized, “Oh, it is because we’re a poor community of color and thus politically vulnerable that we’re being treated this way. So, how do we flip that dynamic?”

And so, I definitely worked on things like how do you develop a much more sustainable solid waste management plan, which is an amazing, wonderful undertaking that I’m just grateful that I got to be a part of with a bunch of other really incredible people. But what was really interesting to me was how, in addition to fighting against stuff… What are we fighting for? Because, again, this is our neighborhood that has been literally defined and created outside of our hopes and dreams and desires. And what is it that we can do to make it something that actually feeds our hopes and dreams and all that good stuff? So, we started thinking about that. And one of the things that came up is how often people would take their kids outside of the neighborhood in order to experience nice things–whether it was a shop or a park. And that’s when I kept getting these notices from this woman named Jenny Hoffner. And she was working with the parks department at the time through a grant from the U.S. Forest Service. And they were working specifically on threatened urban waterways around the country.

And the Bronx River–the only true freshwater river in all of New York City–is one of those threatened, very urban rivers. And Robert Moses–and now we’re back to Robert–was the biggest threat to it because… Lord have mercy. He built all the spaghetti network of parkways that literally run through the Bronx and cross it. And it’s really hilarious when you look at a map and see it. And then there’s the Bronx River Parkway. And I only knew that there was a real Bronx River because I could see it on a subway map. But I had never seen it–literally had never seen the daggone thing. And he rather famously wanted people to travel on the parkways in cars, of course. And their goal was to have something nice to look at as they traveled along the way. And he just thought that the way rivers kind of meandered–that sort of swishy way that they do–just wasn’t cute. “Who wants to make those hairpin turns as they’re on a parkway in their big, old car?” Like, oh, God forbid. And so he straightened the river in this ridiculous engineering feat that was just the most horrible thing–just terrifying for the river. And so here was this Jenny Hoffner lady. She was so cool. She was very cute. I just adored her. She was just like, “Look, we’ve got this little seed grant for people who want to do work on the Bronx River.” And I’m like, “Well, she is obviously really smart and knows all sorts of things, but clearly she doesn’t know you can’t get to the river from here because you just can’t.”

ROMAN MARS: And to be clear, let’s draw a picture. So, why can’t you get to the river from there? What is in the way?

MAJORA CARTER: Yes. Okay. Again, there is a river. We knew that it was somewhere out there. But all along where we knew the river was, there was a whole other layer of industry. There was either some light manufacturing, there was the Hunts Point Market, which literally is the second world’s largest food distribution center, which literally covers all of it– And my neighborhood–it’s only about 690 acres. They take up a third of the acreage in this entire community, and most of it’s on the waterfront. So, you can’t really get there. It’s ridiculous. And so, that’s all I knew to be on the waterfront. So, that doesn’t sound very hospitable.

But I had just a very large, crazy dog at the time. Her name was Xena. Yes–for some of us of a certain age–she was named after the Warrior Princess. It’s true. And she was just utterly rambunctious. And I’d go jogging with her. So, one time while I was still in the neighborhood, she pulled me to what I thought was just sort of a dump that you could see from the street. And I saw it pretty much every time I went running. And it never occurred to me to go into it because it’s a dump. It’s just part of the dumps that are around here. But this time, one day, she literally pulled me and decided there was something in there that she just had to get. And I just happened to be at the other end of her leash. And she pulled me in, and I was just like, “This is gross.” I mean, there was weeds and piles of garbage everywhere. And I’m trying to run through it, hurdling over these things. It was just crazy. And there she was, having the time of her life. But literally, at the end of it, at a clearing, I realized, “Oh my God, I did just run through a dump.” But what I’m facing now at the end of that little run was this beautiful river.

And it was really early. It was, like, 6:00 in the morning. And it really is an image I will never forget because it just was beautiful kind of– It wasn’t magic hour, but it felt like it was. And it was like the sunlight was glinting off the water. It was a good high tide. So, it just looked really beautiful. And you could see this crazy park across the river that really was just a bunch of weeds, but I didn’t care. It looked really beautiful from where I was standing. And I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is the Bronx River! There is a river here! Who knew?” And that’s when I thought, “Oh, maybe Jenny figured that maybe I might figure this out.” And she was 100% right.

I went back and wrote the proposal to get this tiny, little seed grant. And after that, I was the craziest driven woman. And I was like, “Look, we are going to get a park on this waterfront.” And eventually we did. That little $10,000 seed grant was leveraged many, many times over, and it became a $3 million park a good seven years later. But it made these beautiful, little baby steps along the way. I made friends with everybody that I could. I was older at the time, so I didn’t really know who I wasn’t supposed to talk to. I made friends with businesses. I made friends with government agencies. I was like, “Look, I don’t care who you are. Can you help us do this?” But it was a beautiful moment to see how that crazy, little dump transformed into the– It’s now a national award-winning park. Yeah, it’s pretty cool.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s amazing how there are certain stories that recur in myth and in cycles. And your story of going into this forgotten area and finding the place where the park should be on the waterfront is so similar to the story of Moses when he was young–when he was still doing good things–going into the lands of Long Island and finding these places that people had either forgotten or not known about. It seems like… Is the secret to be on the ground–to really be looking at a place and really knowing it from the ground up to find ways to create things like that for people?

MAJORA CARTER: Yeah, I mean you got to be exploring. Although, I think, for me, reading The Power Broker and realizing that Robert Moses actually started off kind of cool was just, like–

ROMAN MARS: That’s the tragedy of it.

MAJORA CARTER: Right. “Wait, wait, what? Wait, I did that. No! No!”

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s amazing because it’s like he went out and found the world that was kind of carved up by the Long Island rubber barons and reclaimed it. And you found the world that he carved up. And so, someday in the future… I guess the world you’ve left behind–someone else will find some amazing spot in it.

MAJORA CARTER: This is true. You know what? And maybe they will, or maybe they’ll improve it. That’s the way I’m going to try to think of it. They’re going to make it better.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, you’ll make it good and they’ll make it even better. Exactly. You won’t take that heel turn that Moses takes.

MAJORA CARTER: Yeah, that would be painful. But you do have to be on the ground. How else are you going to see what folks need? And the talking to people, I find, is something that often goes… I don’t know, I may be undervalued in some ways. I think of journalists who can be deeply embedded when they’re like, “Yeah, I’m deep embedded,” or however that phrase is. And I do think that, on some level, we do have to do that. You don’t always have to do it in order to see what a community needs. But I do think it’s super important for there to be opportunities for folks within those communities to also be the leaders in terms of how their neighborhoods are developing. And I feel like that is often something especially in the kind of neighborhoods that I work in, where that’s not always considered a viable path for folks. But I’m really grateful that I had a chance to express that need, I think, for creation of our own future. And I’m super excited that there are other folks following behind me who also feel like they can do it, too.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. I mean, Robert Moses was completely disinterested in the opinions of people in the neighborhood about what he was doing. But one of his other virtues beyond the beginning stages of him chomping through and exploring places was he had this ability to see beyond what was there and to imagine a future–imagine something. And you write about this in your book–that this is a key element to being a part of your neighborhood, revitalizing a neighborhood, and seeing beyond what is there. So, could you talk about that a little bit?

MAJORA CARTER: Yeah, I mean, I think, early on, when folks would ask me that question, I would think that it was mostly just because I was a creative and I was an artist. So, that’s part of being an artist. You literally look at a blank canvas or a piece of sheet music or a floor that you’re going to dance on or whatever, and then you imagine something different flowering up in there. But now, the way that I see that is more about people feeling as though they actually have the right to create. And I realized that that idea and just that feeling is often not in communities like the ones that I feel have been most impacted by Robert Moses’ work because so many of the communities really have been designed by others through the lens of systemic racism and all of that. I think it beats the hell out of people and just feeling like it’s just enough to survive in some ways rather than to try to do much more of anything else. And so I really do consider it a privilege that I’ve been able to do the work that I’ve done. But I also feel that it’s a right that folks can express. But I think there’s far too many people who feel as though that work actually belongs to be the work of someone else and not necessarily folks within our communities.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, I totally could see that. As agency is robbed of you of when a highway is put in or a river is straightened, there must be just this moment where– I mean, even you, who went to school and had all these ways that you were empowered, must’ve thought, Wwell, can I do something at this park? I mean, am I allowed to?” You know what I mean? There must’ve been just a period of time where you just had to get over your old mental roadblocks to get to the point.

MAJORA CARTER: And it was those mental roadblocks that I had to get over. But it only came through the knowledge that–no–these communities were designed to be this way, which means they could be designed another way.

ROMAN MARS: That’s right. That’s right.

MAJORA CARTER: That’s all! And that was one of the most liberating moments of my entire life, when I felt that I didn’t necessarily have to ask permission to try to do something. And I remember first hearing just literally those words from a mentor of mine who also totally did whatever she could to sort of smack Moses around as well. Her name was Yolanda García, and she was a second generation Puerto Rican woman from Melrose, which is a neighborhood nearby in the South Bronx. And her family owned this furniture store and had for a generation. And she was still running it. And then the city decided to do urban renewal. And there weren’t that many people left. I mean, that neighborhood was just as badly damaged through the fires as ours was. And her neighbors were just like, “Eh, no, we’re not leaving. We’re going to work and we’re going to create the plan ourselves.” So, she and her neighbor started an organization called We Stay or Nos Quedamos, “we stay” in Spanish. And they spent a decade working on developing a plan for that area. And with home ownership and just some really beautiful features that really made you go, like, “Okay, yeah, I see what you’re doing.” But unfortunately, Yolanda didn’t survive. She literally died at her desk. She was younger than I am now. She was in her early, mid-50s. And she didn’t get to see the construction of her work, in part, because she wasn’t really taking care of herself, which is also, I think, a part of that lack of agency. She suffered from a lot of the conditions–the health conditions that many folks in the South Bronx do–which I also think stems from people feeling as though they can’t. There is more of a self-esteem issue. It’s kind of like, “This is what happens. Diabetes is something that just happens to people in our community. And maybe I can do something, but there’s the stress of just living life as a person of color and we feel it all.” And that still haunts me. But I feel like I get a chance, hearing her remind me that I did and do have an opportunity and a right to create the kind of things in our communities–whether or not there are people telling us that we don’t deserve them or need them or anything like that.

ROMAN MARS: I mean, there are a lot of qualities to Robert Moses’ mind, which represent cardinal sins and why he shouldn’t have been the person in charge of all of these things. But one of them is his overall mission in these roads was to move people through and out of places. That’s what these things were for. And I think that that focus creates the condition that you talk about a lot in your book and you do a lot in your work, which is this idea that you’re kind of incentivized– If you do well, your goal is to leave. And you have this quote that’s on the Smithsonian Museum of African-American History that says, “Nobody should have to move out of their neighborhood to live in a better one.” I can guarantee you that this is not a central tenet of Moses’. This is a central tenet of yours.

MAJORA CARTER: No, definitely not.

ROMAN MARS: So, what does that mean? When the master planner of New York is all about moving people through these places and not about being in these places… I mean, the parks you could talk about, but those parks were distributed unfairly so clearly. But what is it when you think about development that’s responsible and that’s responsive and gives equity back to the people who are actually from there, how do you do that?

MAJORA CARTER: I mean, you remember what are the things that everybody wants in a place that makes them feel like they don’t have to move out of their neighborhood to live in a better one. I mean, it’s really simple. People want great places to live, work, and play. They want to feel good about how they move through an area. Is it walkable? Is it the kind of place where you feel like you’re happy to spend your money and feel like you’re getting quality for it, as opposed to feeling like you’re getting reamed in some awful way and it’s just not a pleasant experience for you–whether it’s where you’re living or where you’re working or where you’re shopping. And I feel like that is… People feel that that’s– In particular for and poor people of color–and I’ve seen it all over the country–we tend to use a phrase instead of just “poor” or “disadvantaged,” we call those communities “low status” because “low status” really… Without including race or economic status, it’s clear that those are the places where inequality is assumed by people both inside and outside the neighborhood. And it shows up statistically. And they could be areas as diverse as inner cities or Native American reservations or even poor, white towns where there once was industry but it’s long gone. And now those places remind you statistically of inner cities. And so, we know that that happens as well. Low status communities are the places where young people that grow up in them are taught to measure success by how far they get away from those areas.

And that is exactly the places where we should be thinking about how do we make it so that the experience of anyone going through them literally–on a daily–just how does it make them feel and what do we need to do in order to make it seem as though we can create more economic, environmental, and social wellness in those areas by making a really local and living economy on all those fronts. And I believe you can do that because people in low status communities like the same daggone things that everybody else does. I mean, we want a cool place to live. We want to feel safe. We want to have the opportunity to make a living and have a clean, beautiful, decent to live. And that’s pretty kind of much all there is. I mean, so why do we feel as though, somehow or another, you’re only good enough when you can get that. But obviously you can’t do that in low status neighborhoods. That’s just not going to work because there’s something fundamentally wrong with them. And I feel as though people really, on some level, believe it. And that’s what we’re struggling with. So, no, Robert Moses probably would disagree with me on the fact that there are some places that are good.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. No, he would.

ELLIOTT KALAN: He would, it’s true. So much of the book that Robert Caro writes about is about choices–the choices that people making these decisions make and how none of them are natural. Like you said, things were designed this way. It was a choice that was being made. And Robert Moses was kind of choosing which people deserve nice things and which people do not deserve nice things. And how do you think you go about showing people that even that choice that some people deserve them and some don’t– That’s a choice about not treating people equally and kind of creating high status or low status neighborhoods. How do you think you go about… It seems, like you’re saying, it’s such a fundamental mindset. How do you go about shifting that in the people it needs to be shifted in?

MAJORA CARTER: Oh, I mean… And this is where I do think being a somewhat creative person helped me because it was really easy for me to just know, “Oh, the problem is that people don’t feel like there are choices. But what if we made choices for people to choose between something?” So, that’s why actually working to be a project-based developer, for me, was such an easy kind push because I knew that–if all we did was talk about how things could be better–first of all, it just gets boring and it just gives people reasons to be like, “Well, it’s not happening here, so let’s move somewhere else.” So, that’s why it was like, “Okay, if we can literally change the landscape for folks to see something different, but it’s still in their neighborhood, maybe they could see that maybe things can change here.” And that could be just enough of a push for them to just sort of question, “Why do things happen the way that they do now?” And maybe things could be different.

And so, for me, the artist in me was just like, “Oh, yeah.” And that was much more exciting than just talking about a change that could eventually happen somewhere as opposed to just working to create it there. And it was super fun because what also was one of the many things I like about me but, in particular, what I like about me in this arena… [chuckles] No, it’s true. I don’t know. I have this really crazy sense that I could celebrate the small victories. I can see the tiniest little thing and know that things have changed and then you make a big deal out of it so that folks know that something just happened because people don’t always see those little things as the changes that they are or even as anything because they’re just so used to not even seeing anything that sometimes they don’t even pay attention. So, you have to make a celebration out of it so that folks will go, like, “Oh, wait. Something did just change. That wasn’t like this before.” And so, even with that little crazy park–yeah–it was a dump when it started. People remember that. Believe me. So, after the many different cleanups that we did, we started doing things, like hosting canoe rides out there. It was just really simple just to remind people, “Oh, no, no, no. We do have this amazing natural asset that can actually be fun.” And things like that just blew people’s minds because it was just like, “Wait a second.” But we still had to show them and celebrate those kind of things.

I’ll never forget the first big event that we had down there. And we had canoe rides. We had the senior citizen center who did this beautiful Latin dance come out. I mean, we had a dj. We had the best time. And it was almost as if we might as well have just invited people to Mars because people just could not believe that this was happening in their own neighborhood. It was just a beautiful, beautiful thing. But then, fast-forward to five years later, when we actually had the opening for the park, and it was after a $3 million insertion. And the next thing we know, we had this beautiful thing where… You know, gorgeous park… We won national awards. And people were like, “Wait, that’s in our neighborhood? Is it for us? Is it for us?” And I feel like that was such a telling moment to me. Here we had all worked so hard to show that something like this was wanted and needed in our neighborhood. And then we get, literally, all the bells and whistles. It is just spectacular. And there were folks who were kind of reticent to even walk in it. It was sort of cute when it was sort of, like, a DIY version of a park but with wood chips. And we literally had a sprinkler from Home Depot, which was our water feature. It was hysterical, but it was nice. People liked it. But the other piece–again–that was the part. It was a psychological break that people were just like, “That just does not compute,” because we’re used to our neighborhoods being a certain way and expect it like that.

ROMAN MARS: And now there’s all these sort of official kind of design cues that these are places that you’re not supposed to be.

MAJORA CARTER: Not supposed to be! Yes! And I was just like, “Wait a second. You were just here before we went under construction. This was your park. And now, because it’s nice, it’s not.”

ROMAN MARS: That’s fascinating. Yeah.

MAJORA CARTER: Yeah. We got to work on that.

ROMAN MARS: That’s tragic and fascinating, but that’s something that can be worked on for sure.

MAJORA CARTER: Yeah! Totally. We do it every day literally. And it’s a process.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And the hope, I guess, is that the longer it’s there, the more it becomes taken for granted. “No, this is ours, and we deserve it. And we deserve things like this.”

MAJORA CARTER: And it was just, on that same token, having highways literally run through your community, separating you from your waterfront–that was normal, too. So, Robert Moses is so fascinating because it’s the big vision that was kind of like, “You got to have a big vision.” So, I can respect that on some level, except how it was so horribly executed.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. For sure.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It feels like what he has in common with what you’re doing and what it sounds like is–correct me if I’m wrong–very necessary to any kind of development is imagination. He has to be able to imagine taking the world as it is and changing it. And then it takes a lot of imagination, it sounds like, to look at what he’s left behind and say, “No, it doesn’t have to be this way either. There’s a better way beyond that.” It seems like it’s such a hard thing for people who live in a world to imagine a different version of that world.

MAJORA CARTER: Yeah.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I realized that wasn’t really a question. I was just kind of restating what you said already but inserting the word “imagination” into it.

MAJORA CARTER: But I love the fact that you did because it does require that. and what happens when your imagination is stunted in some way? And I think, unfortunately, many people in New York City felt that in a really big way.

ROMAN MARS: Because the neighborhood and just kind of all neighborhoods have so much imposed on them from outside forces, development from outside forces, and things done to your community that you have no say in or you have limited say in, as you do these things with your neighborhood in mind to make it better for the people in it, including you, who grew up there, you have managed a bit of skepticism from people who are used to the old way of doing things and that making things nicer means it’s no longer for them and then it means they no longer own it–that it’s been taken from them in this sort of rapaciousness and a con that sort of robs the value of a place. How do you navigate that and sort of get things better without losing people in the process and making them understand that they’re not being left behind–they’re being included?

MAJORA CARTER: I love how you refer to the skepticism– Most people would call it my “haters.” I call them my “fan club”–“Majora Carter Fan Club”–because I really do think that they kind of have a little crush on me actually. They can’t spend that much time thinking about me. And they just, like, put so much effort into it. But, yes, there is actual real iteration, too. But…

ROMAN MARS: Just so people understand the premise here– It’s difficult, I know, for you to represent their point of view. But what are they hating on exactly, for people who just don’t know any of this situation?

MAJORA CARTER: Oh, it truly doesn’t make that much sense to me. But from what I understand, many believe that any development is oppositional to the development of the community in a good way. And so, when I started calling myself a real estate developer or wanting to work with understanding how the way local economic development could work that could be in service of supporting our communities, it was just like, “You’ve got to be kidding. It’s either all about building only affordable housing or urban gardening. And anything that’s different from what is sort of, like, the predetermined notions of how we’re supposed to be was just considered anathema to the spirit of community development.” And I just felt and still do feel that we have the ability for our communities to generate and retain wealth, which was literally denied to– Starting with Black folks, and other ones fell right behind, but we are still at the bottom of the heap–Black people. It seemed to me that that was one of the reasons why we needed to be thinking about wealth creation and wealth retention within our communities and doing it in a way that actually supported us first. So, that’s why we focus a lot on home ownership, local business development, and really thinking through how we don’t have to always be the recipients of someone else’s largesse because that really hasn’t worked out for us.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. Yeah.

MAJORA CARTER: I’m just saying.

ROMAN MARS: Totally. And that’s the thing that’s, like… You write about this in this kind of sense that if you interview all these well-meaning people, they go, “Well, we want affordable housing options. We want community centers. We want urban gardens, like you mentioned.” And then when you talk to people who really live there, they’re just like, “I just really want a good place to get a cup of coffee.”

MAJORA CARTER: Yeah. Good place to get a cup of coffee. Nice place to shop. Places that feel good and safe and fun–and fun!

ROMAN MARS: And the story that got them to that point of skepticism and criticism and sort of knee-jerk reaction is also the world that Robert Moses created. When everything is about how that’s somebody else’s resource to exploit, you learn that behavior, too.

MAJORA CARTER: Yeah.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. Well, we’re just about out of time. But I just had a pleasure talking with you, and thank you so much for being on The 99% Invisible Breakdown of The Power Broker. We had a great time.

MAJORA CARTER: I am so excited. I can’t believe I’m on this. Thank you so much for having me. It’s just an honor. It really, really is.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Next month, we’re going to finish Part Six finally–it’s a very long part–and start Part Seven, called The Loss of Power. See? We told you there’d be some comeuppance soon. Don’t worry. The arc of history is long, but it bends towards Robert Moses eventually not tearing people’s homes down. We’ll be covering Chapters 39 through 41. That’s pages 895 through 983. And if you just cannot wait that long to hear my voice talking about something and interrupting people when they’re trying to talk, then please turn to my other podcast, The Flop House on the Maximum Fun Network.

ROMAN MARS: Remember, you can still buy livestream tickets to our talk with Robert Caro. That’s coming up on Monday, October 7th. Find them at nyhistory.org/programs. And be sure to check out our amazing Power Broker merch at 99pi.org/store. I’ve been wearing my Power Broker t-shirt all the time on my walks with my dog, and I’m still waiting for someone to come up and say hi to me.

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, where there are fun discussions with 5,000 other beautiful nerds about The Power Broker, about architecture, about movies, about music, and about podcasts you should be listening to. That’s where I’m hanging out most of these days. You can find a link to that Discord server as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.

MAJORA CARTER: There is a Mister Softee ice cream truck outside my window. Can you hear that? It’s really loud up here, so I’m shocked–

ELLIOTT KALAN: You can’t hear it. But if it shows up on the recording, that’s real Bronx atmosphere. That proves it.

MAJORA CARTER: Okay, there you go. Mister Softee. Right there. It is a part of the zeitgeist here.

ROMAN MARS: It is.