The Power Broker #11: Brennan Lee Mulligan

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

ELLIOTT KALAN: And I’m Elliott Kalan.

ROMAN MARS: So, today we’re continuing Part Seven: The Loss of Power, Chapters 42 through 46. That’s pages 984 through 1,081. And later in this episode, our special guest is Brennan Lee Mulligan. Brennan is a comedian and host with Dropout TV, where he’s the creator of Dimension 20. It’s a show that features incredibly complex and fun and dynamic Dungeons and Dragons campaigns with improv actors and special effects. And as the Dungeon Master, Brennan leads these stories. And I know that might sound completely unrelated to The Power Broker, but one season of Dimension 20 features a villain that all of you listening would be very familiar with in a very different context.

DIMENSION 20: To my understanding, Mr. Moses is a powerful form… / Robert Moses is a powerful historical figure, never elected, but was part of a lot of government boards, had a lot to do with the building and infrastructure of New York, specifically a lot with the building of roads and highways… / Causing interference in the magical world…

ROMAN MARS: So, last time on The 99% Invisible Breakdown of The Power Broker, Robert Caro went into incredible detail about how Robert Moses refused to include mass transit as part of his transportation plans, and it doomed New York to a future choked with cars and traffic and really explicit detail about how awful different railroads were. It was very vivid. But we also saw how an assortment of activists were starting to recognize the serious issues with how Moses was running his slum clearance programs and the public housing construction projects. So, that was a little bit of a glimmer. There were rumors–rumors of rumors. And so on this episode, we’ll be covering Chapters 42 to 46. That’s pages 984 to 1,081. And this is a delightful collection of chapters. Elliott.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Especially after the last chapters, which were so gloomy and doomy, this is going to be a nice change of pace because Robert Moses is on the dissension rather than the ascension. And it’s going to happen in ways that are not entirely satisfying in terms of the scale and scope of the crimes he’s being hoisted on. The petard he’s being hoisted on is not the petard we hoped it would be. But there’s something fun about that and Robert Caro is clearly having fun writing about it, and that really comes through. And by the end of today’s episode, Moses will have been hoisted by his own petard. There’s no other way to put it.

ROMAN MARS: There’s no other way to put it.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, it’s a petard hoisting. It’s a classic petard hoisting. As you were saying, we’re going to pass the thousand-page mark in this episode, which is very exciting. That’s a lot of pages, and we’ll have to take a moment to pop some champagne–really reminisce about the pages that brought us here. But it’s going to be exciting. It’s going to be exciting.

ROMAN MARS: So we start here with chapter 42, Tavern in the Town, which chronicles probably one of the lesser crimes of Robert Moses but still makes a good story. So, how does it begin?

ELLIOTT KALAN: It makes a great story, and it’s also… I’ll just say this before I even start, Roman. This will be an annoying, unnecessary little tangent. 42, as anyone who’s read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Series knows, is the answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything. And in this chapter, we get finally the answer to what will it take to really break away the reputation Moses has as the great guy, the parks man, and the man who can get things done for the people. It’s in this chapter that what he does seems so incredibly trivial and yet reverberates through so much. So it begins talking about how this is going to be the battle of Central Park. Caro reminds everybody how, in 1934, Robert Moses refurbished and renovated Central Park. He replaced the sheep meadow, which previously had been full of inbred, mutant sheep that had been there for generations. He replaces the sheep meadow near Central Park West and 67th Street with a restaurant, Tavern on the Green. Regular listeners will know that’s where my dad proposed to my mom before they got married. Ghostbusters fans will know it as the restaurant where Rick Moranis is finally overtaken by the Terror Dog and, I guess, eaten in plain view of the diners at the restaurant. And he cut a road extension into the park and a parking circle into the park that serves the restaurant. And what’s funny to me here is that Caro is using the sheep as a symbol of the pastoral world that was shunted aside for the restaurant and its parking circle when, back when Caro was talking about the sheep previously, they were monsters. They were implied as disgusting–something you needed to get rid of. But now Caro is having it both ways, and he is like, “What was once bucolic sheep meadow…” It’s like, eh, all right. There’s different ways to look at sheep, I guess.

So, the year is 1956. Let’s place ourselves in time. We are now in 1956, and local families have come to depend on this little tree-shaded glen, between 67th and 68th streets in the park, as a place for their kids to play. They’re using it the way parks have been intended by Moses to be used–as community spaces for people to play in. And the local mothers find the space especially precious. It’s somewhere very close to their apartments. Their kids, who live in apartments, have no outdoor space of their own. And these are middle class, upper middle class kids. These are kids who have resources. These are not slum kids, but they still don’t have outdoor space of their own. They don’t have yards. So, this is a place they can run around. The moms can talk. It is a very important little place in their lives–a place that carries a lot of meaning and emotion for them–until one day on April 9th, 1956. What happens on that day, Roman?

ROMAN MARS: Well, one of the moms–Roselle Davis–she sees these surveyors with blueprints looking over her bucolic glen. And when they break for lunch, they accidentally leave the blueprints behind. And she reads, on the title, “Detailed Map of Parking Lot. And this is the plan to replace the glen with a parking lot to serve Tavern on the Green, which is just like a movie scene. It’s incredible.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, literally, it’s like, “A parking lot? Here? Because they found these papers?” And this is the kind of thing that, if you saw it in a movie, you’d be like, “Come on.” But it happens in real life all the time. I forget what Civil War battle it was where they literally found the Confederate plans wrapped around a cigar and they’re like, “Oh, okay. Now we know what’s going to happen.” And this is something that is not necessarily important, but the last few chapters in the last episode felt very much like data, data, data. “I’m giving you hard information about this urban transportation issue.” And here it feels like Caro has shifted much more into reporter storyteller mode. He is telling a story. And this section is very dramatic and cinematic in a very fun way.

ROMAN MARS: But that also sort of describes why this fight, unlike other fights that involve a lot of data or a lot of real problems that Moses has caused, don’t gain traction. Whereas this one–with this nice story of these nice moms and their upper middle class life–really does take hold in newspapers, which is really the big deal with this one.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes, it shows you the importance of a story, as we’ll see–the importance of a narrative. It is hard to convince people with a lot of numbers, but it is much easier to convince people when you’ve got moms and kids versus bulldozers, as we’ll see. And so Davis tells another mom, Augusta Newman. And Augusta Newman is the wife of Arnold Newman, who’s a well-known photographer. And I think this is one of the differences we had kind of talked about in previous episodes between what happens here and what happened earlier is these are people who have access to media. These are people who have access to professional assistance or are professionals themselves in a way that the people of East Tremont and the people of Harlem just do not have access to. And so they write up a petition, and they try to get it signed by many of the well-known artists and writers who live on the block. A name that comes up a lot is the novelist, Fannie Hurst. I’ve not read any of her work, but I’ve heard the name before. Caros mentions playwright and screenwriter Samson Raphaelson. And he refers to him as “Samuel Raphaelson” for some reason. But I don’t– Unless I’m getting the names mixed up, I don’t know that there is a Samuel Raphaelson. But Samson Raphaelson is a well-known, classic playwright screenwriter. So, this might be the third error I’ve ever found in the thousands of pages of Caro’s work. And one of the other errors is just him getting the name of a movie slightly wrong in one of the Lyndon Johnson books. So, I’m not that mad about it. But this is like Ludwig Bemelmans, the author of Madeline, lives here. Pearl Lang, the dancer, and Mae Murray, this former silent movie star, live there. And there are these other names that, I’m sure, were more well known when the book came out but would have to be researched by modern readers. But in the end, they have this petition with just 23 names on it. We’ve seen petitions with thousands of names get knocked aside. And the parks department are like, “Yeah. 23-name petition?” I’m ignoring this. We don’t want to deal with this.” And the newly installed deputy mayor tries to arrange a meeting and is told off by one of Moses’ secretaries over the phone. But here’s the difference. One of the moms–she signs it. She is not just a person with access to the newspapers, she’s a person who is married to a Herald Tribune reporter. So, Roman, this time it’s personal.

ROMAN MARS: That’s right. But it’s so funny to me how this starts with Moses being completely disdainful because he has been so used to this for so long. 23 moms versus the thousands and thousands when it came to the one-mile section, the 5,000 moms of Manhattantown, 4,000 moms of Lincoln Center–nobody cares. Press still loves him. Everything is just going his way at this point. But just the amount of time and… Really it’s the constituency of the people who are upset that really, really changes things.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes. But he’s so complacent about it. And Caro sums it up. He’s refusing to meet with them. He sends them a letter that says, “Let’s talk about it.” But his plan is he’ll just start tearing up the glen before they talk about it. It’s just what he does. And he sends them this letter. And Caro writes, “His letter would not placate the mothers, of course, but that would no longer matter. By the time they read his explanation of why it was necessary to destroy the glen they were fighting for, there would no longer be any point in fighting for it. It wouldn’t be there. This protest would be disposed of as he had been disposing of protests for 30 years.” And then there’s a space in the page and then he writes, “But this protest was different.” And why is it different? For these reasons we’re talking about. These protesters are educated. They’re financially secure. They’re well connected to the media. There are lawyers in these families. They can afford to raise the money to fight this legally, or they can do the work themselves. These are not people who are lower class people who live in a neighborhood that–even though it’s clean and nice and people love it–does not have the resources.

And this is also different because it’s so clear cut. Caro makes the point that you can have competing ideas about whether a road is more important in this space or a neighborhood, whether housing is more important in this space or a neighborhood, or what the needs of a city are, but this is children’s play space versus a parking lot for a restaurant. So, this is the closest the book gets to the plot of Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, where it’s literally a community center for needy kids versus a shopping mall. It’s so clear cut. And Moses’ role is so clear cut in this. In the housing fights that he does, he can hide behind the private developers who are technically irresponsible for the on-the-ground stuff, even though he’s calling a lot of shots. This is a park issue. It’s in Central Park. And everyone knows Moses is the parks man. And not only that, this is Central Park, which is a special park. It is literally, as everyone says, the lungs of the city.

And I think it is hard to argue that the single greatest decision of the planners of New York City– It’s hard to argue that there was a greater decision than the one to leave this space open–than to not grid it out and to make it into just streets and to leave this enormous space because Central Park is huge. It’s a huge park. It’s not the biggest park in New York City. I think that’s Pelham Bay Park, but nobody goes up there. I mean, people do, but it’s not the same. Central Park is right in the middle of the action. And it is a really sacred space. And remember months ago, we talked about what a big deal it was when Moses refurbished the park in the 1930s. That was one of the things that made him such a heroic figure for the city–that he turned Central Park into this beautiful place again that people could take a break from living in this crammed-in city. And it’s a park that people spend a lot of time in. He can’t do something there and hide it and keep it secret the way he could when he rammed the Major Deegan through the Van Cortlandt Park marshes. People see Central Park. It’s in the middle of Manhattan. It’s very open. And so it’s a very public place for him to pick a fight and especially to pick a fight with moms.

ROMAN MARS: But he does. And he starts doing the thing that he normally does, which is–before anyone can sort of realize it–he sends his bulldozers to rip it up and to make it so that it’s a fait accompli and they can protest all they want to. But they actually caught onto this. They see the bulldozers coming. One of the Central Park West residents, Eleanor Sanger, looks out her bathroom window, she sees bulldozers ripping up trees, and–

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s such a cinematic scene. She’s just going in the morning to, like, brush her teeth or whatever. And she looks out the window and sees bulldozers. I mentioned Hitchhiker’s Guide already. It’s literally the opening of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; he looks outside and sees bulldozers going to knock his house down. And so she sees it, and what does she do?

ROMAN MARS: She just calls her friends, and they run down there–just basically women and children and baby carriages. And they stand in front of a bulldozer. And that looks so fun to take photographs of to put in the newspaper. And they know it.

ELLIOTT KALAN: They don’t necessarily stand in front of the bulldozer because these are women with children in their hands, but they make themselves visible to the bulldozer. And the bulldozer driver stops his work. And she’s also called Stanley Isaacs–we’ve mentioned him before–longtime civic reformer. And he helps to get the press there. And the press shows up. Like you’re saying, this is moms and kids versus bulldozers. And this is a good story for the media that you can take pictures of. And when Lillian Edelstein was trying to save her part of East Tremont, she could barely get reporters to notice. She would hold rallies with hundreds of people and reporters not there. But now, moms with baby carriages are having a face-off with bulldozers in Central Park. And reporters from all the newspapers and the TV stations and the radio stations rush in. And soon the story is everywhere. And something that Caro does not talk about too much here–I think maybe because he’s such a newspaper guy–is the difference that television probably made with this, too.

ROMAN MARS: That’s true.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Television just brings an immediacy to things that newspapers and radio don’t necessarily. Sorry, Roman. I hate to say that about radio, but–

ROMAN MARS: That’s okay.

ELLIOTT KALAN: There’s just something about television. And maybe that’s a difference, too. But he doesn’t quite get into that. And the mothers–they set up a rotating guard from 7:00 AM to dark every day to keep the bulldozers from starting up. And the reporters–they love it. It’s got famous names. It’s got moms and kids. It’s got trees during what happens to be Arbor Day week–not the best week to be knocking down trees in your park. It’s got a park in danger. It’s got bulldozers. And this isn’t just a local park issue in some neighborhood. This is the battle of Central Park. That’s how they frame it.

ROMAN MARS: And moms versus Moses, which is another way they frame it. You know, it’s perfect.

ELLIOTT KALAN: The Battle of Central Park: Moms versus Moses. That’s your movie title. Right there. It’s amazing. And even now in the 21st century, what is the most potent thing in any political conversation? The thing that gets brought up is what is this going to do to our kids? “I’m a mom, and I’m concerned about my kids.” The single most probably universal, like, basic, fundamental relationship in human existence is probably mother and child. Sorry, dads. I hate to break it to you. Sorry, aunts, uncles, and siblings. And it doesn’t mean you need a mother to be raised great, but it goes back to the animal kingdom and evolution–that relationship between mothers and children. And so to be able to tap into that, Robert Moses can bluster all he wants. But there’s an unbreakable bond between people and their mothers.

ROMAN MARS: And this is also one of those things where, because he’s the parks guy and it’s Central Park and he’s such a towering figure, he can stand behind, like, “the engineers say this for this road”–all sorts of stuff. This is the one that he’s always held onto where every decision is his. He gets credit for all of it. And therefore he gets all of the blame for this one.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes.

ROMAN MARS: That’s just totally different than the other stuff, which you can sort of put these layers of, like, “engineers say this, the city needs this–different rules that are complicated that he wrote the laws for and everything like this.” But this is just a choice. It’s very simple. It just makes good copy, and he’s just completely out of his league.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And he’s saying the same things he said before, but it’s not working. Even the New York Times comes out against the parking lot, which is a big thing. They usually support him on things. And Moses responds. His parks executive, Stuart Constable, AKA, “the Mustache”– And I don’t remember if Caro attributes that nickname to anyone in particular or if he came up with it or that’s what they called him, but this is a character we’ll see a lot of in the next chapter as well–the Mustache. And they secretly install a fence in the middle of the night and send the bulldozers in. Even the NYPD is not notified. They find out in the middle of the night when someone reports to a police officer, “Hey, it looks like people are building things in the park. Something’s going on.” And they have to send police officers in to hold the moms back in the morning while trees are knocked down and being chopped into pieces.

And the media, in the past, has always applauded Moses’ ways of getting things done. They kind of winked at him for those kind of devious ways. They talked about it like it was the “oops sorry” method of getting things done. But now they turn on him. They got pictures of mothers crying as trees are cut down. They appear everywhere, though unfortunately they’re not in this book. Again, the photo section is the one part of this book that I feel like is such a letdown. But they do show a photo in the book of a picture Caro describes of a little boy holding a toy rifle as a police officer stands guard at the fence. And it’s just– All these photos come in, embarrassed police officers, anguished mothers, anti-Moses letters to the editor pour in, and Moses is not destroyed, but for the first time he’s really tarnished. And Caro writes, “Tuesday, April 24th, 1956, the day that Robert Moses sent his troops into Central Park was Robert Moses’ Black Tuesday. For on it, he lost his most cherished asset, his reputation. The Moses boom had lasted for 30 years. Now, it was over.”

ROMAN MARS: Wow.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And it’s not like… I mean, it’s not like then Moses is like, “All right, nevermind.” The trees come down. He tears those trees down.

ROMAN MARS: And during this period, he’s also building some of the major highways and bridges of this time. You know what I mean? This is not a complete diminishment of his power. But right here, he really takes it on the chin.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes. And the mayor stands behind him because he has the power. The mayor needs that power. But one thing kind of different happens before he can start laying down the concrete for this parking lot. And so remember back in 1934, he tore down the Central Park Casino and people were like, “You shouldn’t do that,” and the state court said, “He can do whatever he wants, he has total power over the parks”? Now, 22 years later, it’s 1956 and thes state supreme court–one of the justices actually grants an injunction halting work pending a hearing. And this is the kind of thing they didn’t even do before–grant these injunctions. And Moses is like, “I’m going to win this. I can get it done my way.” He refuses to compromise. And that’s when Stanley Isaacs–that wiley old reformer–he remembers one thing and discovers two things. He remembers that, one, when Moses tore down the original casino to build the Tavern, he said he made a big stink about how only restaurants with reasonable prices should be in a public park. And by 1956, the Tavern’s prices are not reasonable. They’re charging $4.50 for a hamburger and a beer. I mean, that sounds like an amazing deal, but in 1956 it was not. And Caro quotes one news story. He goes, “Dinner and tip for two came to $23. There was another $5 at the bar for two drinks each. It’s not a place to go the day before payday.” And again, like with the rents we were talking about in previous episodes, I’m salivating over those prices. And this is not a restaurant the average person could just walk into and buy a hamburger in. And the second and more important thing Isaac discovers is the sweetheart deal that Moses gave to the restaurant’s owner, Arnold Schleifer. Schleifer is supposed to pay the city 5% of his gross income, which is already ridiculously low rent for a fancy restaurant in a major city park in a fantastic location. But even that percentage he hasn’t been paying because his contract allows him to deduct the cost of improvements to the restaurant from his taxes. So, Isaac finds that over a four year period, Schleifer made almost $1.8 million and he paid the city $9,000 in taxes. And Moses is essentially making this guy rich at the city’s expense. And Caro makes it clear that the deal is not illegal. Moses is not getting a kickback, although the quid pro quo is that Schleifer has to cater every banquet Moses likes. And we talked in that earlier episode about how Schleifer catered that one banquet in a way that was just a little too fancy “ethnic” for Moses. And he wrote that great memo about it. But this flies in the face of another part of Moses’ reputation–this idea that the guy doesn’t cater to favoritism and that he doesn’t do sweetheart deals. He clearly is, and the press can make a lot of hay about this too. They can oversimplify the story to make it sound more corrupt than it is. But whereas, in the past, the press’s oversimplification has helped Moses, now it’s starting to hurt him.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, well, it’s like an infection. The mothers and the images of the cute kid with the air rifle and stuff like that–they sort of make a little cut. And then all of a sudden this type of thing, which normally wouldn’t cause him any problems whatsoever, has just enough damage there to infect and sort of get him off of his normal game when it comes to this stuff.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, it’s this chipping away–this little bit of chipping away at the reputation that holds him up. And I just want to note, it’s at this part of the story that we were on page 999 in the book. We’re about to do it, people. We’re about to tip over into quadruple digits in page numbers–not something you see in a lot of books. Really love it. Only the people who loved the Shōgun TV series so much that they’re now reading that novel are going to feel this thrill this year of reaching a thousand pages.

ROMAN MARS: So, what’s funny about this still is that, for decades, Moses has just sort of lived this way and sort of bulldozed over people metaphorically and literally, and he still doesn’t quite get that he’s on the losing side of this. And so he takes off to Spain.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah. He leaves on a 24-day vacation to Spain. This is one of those things where I wonder sometimes… I trust Caro so much. But he’ll be like, “Moses was unstoppable. He always worked. Then he went on a vacation for two weeks in The Bahamas. Then he went on a 24-day vacation in Spain.” I’m like, “I don’t work as hard as Moses, and I don’t take 24-day vacations in Spain.” You were just in Spain, Roman, right? You were not there for almost a month.

ROMAN MARS: I was not there for almost a month, but I definitely could have been. That place is great.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Such a great country. It’s wonderful. I want to go back so badly. I haven’t been in years.

ROMAN MARS: It’s so good.

ELLIOTT KALAN: But you’re right. He’s so confident. He’s like, “I don’t even need to be here.” Unfortunately, and this will be a problem in the next chapter too, who does he leave in charge? The mustache, Constable, who is like Moses without the tact and the strategizing and the grace and the wit. Constable is just unnecessarily over-stonewalling the press. And that keeps the story alive, and it makes the city angrier. And Moses is not there to coordinate the responses of politicians–of park reps. The media is pouncing on and sensationalizing every little comment that someone makes to keep the story going. And the next round of judges in the court battle upholds the injunction. And one of them comments how he’s happy with his judge’s salary, but even for him, a steak at the Tavern is pretty pricey. He can’t afford to eat there regularly. And it starts getting safer to publicly criticize Moses. This is a guy that people had to whisper about before if they wanted to criticize, but now it’s becoming easier and easier to do that. And Moses returns to the city after what was probably an amazing vacation in Spain. It was harder to get news from overseas then, so I’m sure he was shielded from some of this. And he tries to keep his cool, but he ends up blowing up in the press the way he always used to when he was mad. And he goes so far as to attack Fannie Hearst–this respected elderly novelist–for making a stink about this children’s play area when she doesn’t even have children. “How does she have a stake in this if she doesn’t even have children?” Reading this, I was like, “Oh my God, I didn’t think this part was going to be as relevant as it is now.”

ROMAN MARS: It’s really loathsome.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah. The fact that it felt like it was ripped from today’s headlines–this idea of someone saying, “Well, if you don’t have children, you don’t have a stake in the country.”

ROMAN MARS: “You’re somehow selfish and don’t care about the future.”

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, it’s bonkers. Unlike in the past, now the media is also giving the people Moses attacks a chance to apply to his attacks. And this attack on Fannie Hurst is really seen as too far. You know what I just realized? I kept saying “next chapter” about Constable and the Mustache, but it’s actually a chapter after next chapter.

ROMAN MARS: That’s okay.

ELLIOTT KALAN: My apologies. Later in the episode. And Moses realizes that if this case keeps going through the court, then there’s going to be a discovery of other statements he’s made and other sweetheart deals he’s made. He’s going to have to testify about these things. That would be bad. He can’t be in court testifying about this stuff because then he’s on the record. He can’t play games about it. So he does what he almost never does. He does something that is anathema to him. Roman, what does he do in terms of building this parking lot? What does he do?

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. Well, he gives up.

I mean, yeah, it is kind of amazing. He doesn’t go through with it, which is amazing.

ELLIOTT KALAN: He just backs down. He tries to do it as quietly as possible. He has these delaying motions for the lawsuit. And then when the media dies down a little, he kind of agrees to give in so that it doesn’t seem, in his eyes, as such a big loss. And he agrees to build a playground in that spot where the parking lot would’ve been. And now, Roman, I did a little on the ground investigating for this part of the episode. While I was preparing for this episode, we had our event at the New York Historical Society where we talked to Robert Caro on stage. It was amazing. When people hear the audio from it, they will hear me noticeably run out of words. I’m so emotional at the end of it. It’s an experience I’ll carry with me in my heart for the rest of my life. But beforehand, I decided to do a little Caro-style investigating, and I walked over to that part of the park because it’s very close to the historical society. And I wanted to be on the scene. I said, “What would Robert Caro do? He would go and be in the space.” And I walked around to those playgrounds that they put in, which are still there, which are definitely not as nice as a grove of trees would be. They’re okay. They’re okay playgrounds. And I went down to Tavern on the Green, and that parking circle is still there, where cars can drop people off. And when you look at it, it feels like someone came along and took a bite out of the park and just left pavement behind. It really feels like the outside world of the city has invaded briefly and been pushed back but has left an emptiness–a void–behind. And so, to imagine that parking lot in the area where those playgrounds are–it would’ve been a very noticeable chunk taken out of the park. And it’s an enormous park. But walking around, you’re like, “Yeah, this would’ve had an effect. It would’ve had a real effect on the people who lived in that neighborhood.” And it feels like something would’ve been torn out of it. And for what? For a parking lot? For a restaurant? I looked at the prices on the menu, and I was like, “This is an overpriced restaurant.” The prices have kept up with inflation, let’s say. It’s still an expensive hamburger. So, no thanks. That’s what I say to that parking lot.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, it’s one of those things where there was a plan he dug in. He may have had some friendly conversations with the proprietor of the restaurant or something like that to make it all make sense at the time. I mean, it’s kind of amazing because this is not a great hill to die on for him. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s such a small thing. And what’s notable is that, at a certain point, he perceived that as well because that’s the new sort of behavior with him. He just realized that there is no reason to take this much damage for this parking lot.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And it’s chipped away at his reputation in a number of ways, and it’s such a tiny hill for this to happen on. But Moses’ hope was “nobody’s going to notice that I gave in and lost this battle.” But it gets big media attention. And Caro talks about the effect of that. He says, “The aura of infallibility was gone also…” He’s talking about some other stuff that was gone. “The aura of infallibility was gone also. If Moses was the man who got things done, implicit was the assumption that the things that he got done were things that should be gotten done. He had always been portrayed as a man who was right. Now, in a single dramatic tableau, he had been shown to be utterly, unmistakably wrong.” This idea that he’s not a guy who can always get things done, he’s not a guy who’s incorruptible, he’s not infallible, he is not someone that you don’t dare go up against because you’re always going to lose–all these things have been removed from his reputation by this. Again, it’s kind of a trivial thing–to give a parking lot to a restaurant, which of all the things he’s done is by far not the worst and not something you would even expect him to stick so on. And you all kind of have to wonder, “Maybe if he hadn’t gone on that vacation to Spain, he would’ve wriggled out of it in some more face-saving way.” I don’t know.

ROMAN MARS: Right. But what this does is it starts this cycle of fights in which Robert Moses does not win and also where Robert Moses is the bad guy.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes.

ROMAN MARS: And what’s really notable is that there begins to be a group of newspaper reporters who were not alive–or at least sentient–during those time periods where Robert Moses would destroy a newspaper man’s life pretty easily. And so they start seeing that there’s some stories here and they start acting. And that’s what the next chapter is about. It’s called Late Arrival. We’ll get to that after the break.

[AD BREAK]

ROMAN MARS: So, this is Chapter 43, Late Arrival, which is, like, a little rude.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Especially since Caro’s like, “I’ve been writing about this whole time. What about you guys?” But I think he’s not talking about the reporters so much as the editors.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, he really is. The powers that run these newspapers–finally they start to see that criticizing Moses and telling these stories that are very compelling to the news-reading public is, like, you know… It’s worth it.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And it takes a lot of work to get them to that point. And it’s the work of a group of reporters that Caro really has a lot of fun writing about. I think he feels a real kinship with these characters and admires them. He starts the chapter with an incredibly prescient quote from Robert Moses–one of these quotes, where it’s super ironic so he makes use of it a lot, from 1933. And Robert Moses is talking about another New York politician who was having his comeuppance. And he says, “The great Statesman McKee is a synthetic character, which never actually existed on sea or land, puffed up by the press… And now in the process of deflation, there’s a large amount of unfairness to the individual in this process. But in the end, it arrives at the truth.” And it’s as if 25 or so years earlier–23 years earlier–he’s writing his own epitaph, which is amazing. It’s very prescient. It just happens sometimes. History rhymes or whatever. So, we’re introduced to some characters here. And one of them–one the main ones here–is this reporter for the World Telegram and Sun. Again, a newspaper that does not exist anymore. I always wonder if it’s like, “Did the Telegram newspaper and the Sun newspaper merge?”

ROMAN MARS: It must be.

ELLIOTT KALAN: “And then the World newspaper merged with that one.”

ROMAN MARS: A lot of these read magnetic fridge poetry. There’s, like, World, Telegram, Herald, Times… And then they just throw ’em up and rearrange ’em over time. So, I love it.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And so this reporter–Gene Gleason–he says to his editors, “I want to investigate Robert Moses because I’m sure that there’s other fishy stuff–that the Tavern on the Green contract is not the only fishy thing about Robert Moses.” And normally his editors would say no. But the Battle of Central Park has inspired them to say, like, “Okay, I’ll allow it.” His editor says, “I’ll allow it.” And Gleason wants to start investigating the power of public authorities. But unfortunately, no groundwork has been done on that story before because the records are inaccessible. You can’t get them. There’s nowhere to start. But a little groundwork has already been done on the Manhattantown Public Housing project. And so Gleason is like, “Okay, I think there’s potential. There’s something for me to work off of.” And he starts working with one of the rewrite men at the newspaper. And I apologize to call him a rewrite man, but all the reporters pretty much are men at this point–not for fair reasons–not because the men were just doing such a bang up job reporting. And so he works with this rewriter, Fred J. Cook. And I think what’s interesting here is… I forget how a newspaper works in this way, where there’s often this delegation of abilities between the person who is out doing the investigative work and the person that you call it into at the office who does the actual writing of the article. And they worked together so well on this, but it’s just a reminder to me of, like, “Oh, Robert Caro could have written a whole book about how newspapers work.” And it would’ve been fascinating.

ROMAN MARS: Totally.

ELLIOTT KALAN: There’s just so much I don’t know about it. But they start putting together a series of articles that don’t discover new things so much as they assemble all the known facts about Manhattantown in one place for the first time. And the facts show that Moses’ Slum Clearance Program is clearing out functioning neighborhoods and replacing them with nothing–just unfinished projects or slums. And they haven’t found the corruption in the program yet, but they do make it clear that the program is making housing worse. It is not improving the problem. And most importantly, rather than blaming the “city,” they name Moses and they put the blame on him. And so in a movie, this would be front page news. It would crack the case. Suddenly, everyone would be investigating Moses. Is that what happens, Roman?

ROMAN MARS: No, that’s not what happens at all. It’s also one of those things where this story is just so complicated and it involves lots of different people. And maybe those people–their victimization isn’t as compelling to newspaper readers. It’s just one of those things that doesn’t quite have the traction that these sort of park fights do because the other one that we’re going to talk about next chapter is another kind of low stakes park fight.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s the lowest stakes park fight. And it’s basically over a misunderstanding more than anything else.

ROMAN MARS: But yeah, this one doesn’t quite stick because it has the same kind of issues of all this stuff. But I mean, this is a very classic corruption that they uncover. Developers siphoned off money. And the story just gets buried. It is not interesting to people.

ELLIOTT KALAN: They put it on the back pages of the paper. And the editors are still afraid enough of Moses that they tell him about it ahead of time, and they provide space in the paper for him to have a rebuttal where he attacks the paper zone story. And they don’t put Moses’ name in the headlines. And something that I think we’ve only become more familiar with in modern times is often people just look at the headlines. They don’t read the article. This is something that James Fallows writes about–that a headline frames a story in a way that tells the reader what the main information is. And so the headline can be vastly not unrepresentative of the actual story. But the headline is what’s going to stick with people. So, if Moses’s name is not in the headline, people are not going to think it.

But one story leads to another. And there’s this domino effect that Caro talks about, where he says, “Investigative reporters quickly become aware of a phenomenon of their profession. Information so hard to come by when they’re preparing to write their first story in a new field suddenly becomes plentiful as soon as that first story has appeared in print.Every city agency has its malcontents and its idealists and its malcontent idealists.” I love that. It’s such a great way to say it. “Officials and aides and clerks and secretaries unhappy with the philosophy by which it is being run or the payoffs that are being made within it who have been just waiting for years for the appearance of some forum in which their feelings can be expressed.” And so once these first articles come out, even though they’re in the back, Gleason and Cook’s phones start ringing. People are coming out of the woodwork to complain about Moses. And suddenly there are lots of leads for them to continue this investigation and dig deeper. And of course, everyone’s afraid of Moses, so it all has to be off the record. And a source in the comptroller’s office reveals how the developers are milking their housing developments for millions while leaving tenants without heat. They’re not paying taxes to the city for years. And again, these stories don’t get that much play. They’re complicated in a lot of ways. They involve names and numbers. If other papers mention them, it’s usually just to run Moses’s denials. And the New York Times is still carrying Moses’s water for him. They’re still not ready. They disagreed about the parking lot, but they’re not ready to turn on him completely.

And then in June, 1957, it comes out that the Manhattantown developers have siphoned off so much money that they have none left to pay their taxes or their mortgage or build any of the buildings they’ve contracted to build and the city will have to foreclose on this development. This is a city project that was given to developers. The city will now have to foreclose on it. And the Times buries this story, but the other papers don’t. And Gleason gets Mayor Wagner to say at a press conference that he was conned for five years by these developers. And that’s a big thing.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. And the tone of these newsrooms is changing a lot. And the older reporters who used to criticize some of these upstarts for questioning the powers that be in the city are now doing follow-up questions. And it’s beginning to become clear that this sort of rich diversity of different newspapers is helping the situation now. Like, if the Times isn’t going to do it, someone else is going to cover it. And therefore– I mean, this is the whole point of having an active and vibrant press, really. It’s kind of amazing.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Gleason and Cook, once again, fall prey to the great liberal myth that, once you get the information out there, the system will do its job and people will get mad or they’ll change their minds–it’ll be great. They’re like, “Moses is going to get his comeuppance now. He’s going to have his wings clip by the mayor.” But they don’t understand how central Moses has become to the actual invisible machinery of the city. And so Caro says, “The two reporters’ expectation was not unreasonable. Ordinarily, the tainting of a city program was scandal and failure–scandal of immense proportions, failure five years in duration–would result in at least curtailment of the powers of the mayoral subordinate heading that program, lest the public outcry turn against the mayor. Their expectation was just based on a false premise that Robert Moses was really the mayor’s subordinate. They did not understand that, as a matter of practical politics, the mayor could not discipline, demote, or remove Title I’s administrator. And so they were surprised at ensuing developments.” And those developments are that a spokesman of Moses’ announces that new developers are coming in to take over Manhattantown. They’re not going to have foreclosure hearings. The old developers will have no penalties. In fact, the two principal stockholders of the mismanaged Manhattantown Inc, are going to be kept on the payroll as consultants. They’re actually going to have their stock bought out from them, and they’re going to remain stockholders in the new development. So, these guys who cheated the city out of millions–they’re going to keep making money off of it.

And there’s an outcry. And the mayor’s like, “All right, I’ll take action. I will cut off some of the money those developers would receive. They’re still going to be rewarded for their failure. They’re just not getting as much reward.” And Gleason and Cook are like, “We did all this work, and all we managed to do was get more money to the bad guys.” And Moses has not really been affected at all. And Moses has big plans at this point. He is planning this new vision of Manhattan’s West Side, Lincoln Center, which involves razing– Not razing like raising up, but raising as razing to the ground. R-A-Z.

ROMAN MARS: Like a razor–shaving.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, exactly. Oh, they probably come from the same root. I never even thought about that. Roman, you’re so smart. Come on. You’re as smart as the empire that bears your name. They’re going to raze 18 square blocks, and they’re replacing them with Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, the New York Ballet, the High School of Performing Arts, Julliard, Fordham University’s new campus… The newspapers love this plan. It’s going to displace 7,000 low-income families and replace their homes with 4,000 luxury apartments. But the newspapers love it. And Roman, I want to hear what you have to say, but then I have a thing I want to say about Lincoln Center.

ROMAN MARS: Well, here’s the thing. It’s not better than 7,000 homes for people who can afford it, but Lincoln Center is pretty great.

ELLIOTT KALAN: That was what I was going to say. In all disclosure, I have spent so many memorable hours and beloved hours of my life at Lincoln Center. Some of my happiest memories of experiencing culture and art have taken place there. It’s a place that is inextricably tied in with my memories with my grandmother, who I spent many, many hours with there. And so when I think about her, I think about Lincoln Center. I was in New York for that event, and I walked by Lincoln Center twice. And each time, I was just flooded with these feelings. It’s a magical place. But again, you don’t want to kick out 7,000 people for the opera.

ROMAN MARS: Or if you do these big plans, you have to take care of them. And he never did that sort of thing. But you see movies in the park there in the summertime. I’ve watched people dance to silent discos there. And it has all these cultural– As a center of culture, it’s kind of stunning how concentrated it all is at this place. And anyway, it’s just one of those ones like– I mean, Jones Beach didn’t have anything that it was knocking down. So therefore, it’s kind of this unalloyed good. And this one is plenty alloyed, I guess. But Lincoln Center is pretty awesome, I think.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes. I feel a little about it like I felt like when I visited Versailles years ago, where I was like, “They could have fed so many people with the money it took to build this house. But those people would still be dead now and the house is still here, so I’m getting to enjoy the house.” And like you’re saying, the people that were displaced should have been taken care of, should have been accounted for, and maybe should have had a say in the process.

ROMAN MARS: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

ELLIOTT KALAN: But it is hard not to feel, as a New Yorker, a certain amount of pride in this–that there’s this space where you can… I mean, if they were all scheduled on the same day, you can go to the opera, then go to the ballet, then hear the Philharmonic, then look at the fountain where they shot that scene in The Producers… I’ve seen so many things there that were amazing, but it’s hard to know that, while you’re there, so many people’s homes were taken from them to make it possible.

ROMAN MARS: You could argue–I mean, it’s a little different, but it’s sort of in the same philosophy–that the existence of Central Park, even though it doesn’t knock down homes, does deny a lot of spaces where homes could be built to make life more affordable in Manhattan. And that’s a choice that we make. And I think it’s a good choice that is made on behalf of the citizens of New York. But it’s one of those things. It does matter that there was something there ahead of time. I’m not trying to just abstract this to the point of having just a philosophical discussion where people mean nothing. But there is a cost when it comes to, like, things take place in physical space. And if you have one thing, you don’t have another. And this is just one of those ones where at least the end product, I think, was executed in an interesting and valuable– Like, that was an interesting, valuable thing that was made. I cannot say that about the Cross Bronx Expressway.

ELLIOTT KALAN: No, I certainly have no loving memories of the Cross Bronx Expressway at all. Whereas Lincoln Center is a place that, like I said, I have such a personal relationship with.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. Yeah.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I can’t be impartial about it, but you’re right that, I think, it gets to the heart of what so much of what Caro was saying–that everything is a choice. Everything in governance and how you run a city is a choice. And choosing to keep Central Park a park means effectively raising the price of housing for everyone who lives in the city a certain amount. And that was an easy choice to make when the city was half or not even a quarter built and you still had farm estates up in what would become 125th Street. But it is a choice that they make. And you’re right that there are those choices. What is not the best way to do it though with Lincoln Center is the things that the papers didn’t dig into in their enthusiasm for the project. So, how Moses is selling the land to involve developers at discount prices, how he’s paying politically connected landowners like the Kennedys above market purchase prices–

ROMAN MARS: I forgot about that. Like, seven times as much, or something like that. It’s crazy.

ELLIOTT KALAN: A lot more money. And the federal administrator for Title I funds–Albert M. Cole–he thinks this is the moment to demand Moses answer for his kind of slipshod and misleading way of administering Title I projects. And he threatens to cut off all of Title I’s funds to the city if Moses doesn’t change his ways and Moses threatens to resign. And within an hour, Mayor Wagner is backing him publicly. And the papers rushed to back up Moses against the federal government, just like when Roosevelt tried to get him fired. And Moses calls his powerful friends. They call the White House. And Cole has to back down. And Gleason and Cook start realizing Moses is still too powerful for the federal government to undercut him, let alone the city government, let alone regular people. And this aura of incorruptibility–even though it’s not all the way there–it’s still strong enough that people will defend him against the federal government. And his infallibility has been disproven by the Central Park Battle.

But there’s still this idea that he’s a public servant above politics. He’s not on the take. He doesn’t get involved in petty political battles. And they realize it’s going to take a lot more work on behalf of reporters, whose editors have invested a lot of years in the Moses myth, to make a real difference. Moses has had such a relationship with top publishers and top editors that he can just take it for granted that they’re going to believe in him. And Gleason and Cook find that their sources within city agencies after that first rush–they’re newly paranoid. They don’t want to talk about it. But they keep digging. And they’re able to start reporting the ties between local politicians and the slum clearance developers–developers who get contracts. And by 1958, they can show that the director of Moses’s Slum Clearance Committee is a stockholder in the Nassau Management Company, the real estate relocation firm that we talked about in a previous episode that has been paid millions to do essentially nothing–to help nobody. And they start finding more and more links between Moses’ people and the companies being given contracts and local politicians.

But at this point–Roman, you talked about how other reporters are going to jump in–they’re still not jumping in yet. Editors keep removing Moses’ names from their articles. They keep pressuring them, “Do some other stories. These are too complicated.” And Caro says the stories about corruption in these projects are being put on page 27. And the stories about how Moses has this great project he’s building are on page one. And by 1959, the leads are really drying up. Moses is starting to get public works named after him, which is pretty out of the ordinary for a living person. And Gleason and Cook are like, “We were going to pin him on Title I on the corruption, but I guess that’s dead now,” until they come up with their plan.

And Caro says, “To understand what Gleason and Cook did then, it is necessary to understand Gleason and Cook.” And you’re like, “I’ve been reading about these guys. Now is when you’re going to tell me about them?” And just he gets into their personalities. Gleason–he’s that classic Front Page, His Girl Friday, hard-drinking, fast-talking reporter dedicated to protecting the little guy. He loves the thrill of it–the rush. And Cook is this unassuming guy, but he’s also a crusading liberal who wants to protect the little guy. And Caro mentions how Cook wrote a book defending Alger Hiss when Alger Hiss was at his most pariahish–a stance that, in 1974, seemed better. It has aged poorly now, considering Alger Hiss–I don’t want to reopen it–probably did what he was accused of doing. It is no longer just taken for granted that, if you’re liberal, you love Alger Hiss and defend him.

ROMAN MARS: That’s right.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And for anyone listening who doesn’t know that name, either look it up or don’t worry about it. It’s the kind of thing that my grandparents just took as gospel–that Alger Hiss had been railroaded. Cook hates that Moses pushes people around, and Caro quotes him using the phrase “the power brokers” to talk about Moses and the people around him, which is, I think, the first time the phrase really gets brought up in the mouth of somebody. Maybe this is around the time it’s getting born.

ROMAN MARS: I actually wondered if this is where Caro gets the name of the book because this is all reported obviously well before he’s writing all this stuff. And if this is unlocking… I don’t know. I don’t know. The power broker is not a phrase I know besides coming from this book, really. I mean–

ELLIOTT KALAN: I know it from this book, and I know it from the Marvel Comics supervillain, The Power Broker, who’s the guy who gives people superpowers.

ROMAN MARS: But it seems to me like it’s possible that… I mean, maybe it’s just sort of common parlance among people who write about politics and stuff that there are power brokers and this and that. And maybe it’s just such super common of a phrase. But it shows up here, and it’s very notable to me. This is sort of a great moment in the book.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It is the moment in the movie where someone says the title. “Oh, he’s like some kind of power broker.” And the audience goes, “Oh…”

ROMAN MARS: And we’ve heard the phrase used by Caro, but we haven’t heard it used by a character in the story, which is really great.

ELLIOTT KALAN: But he doesn’t make a lot out of it. He just has it in the quote. And so it’s done very subtly. And so Gleason and Cook–the thing that he talks about here also is that they’re competitive. All these reporters are competitive. They want the credit. They want the glory of the big story. They want to beat the other papers. But they realize if their editors aren’t supporting them, they’re going to have to find a way around that. And the only way around that is to start colluding with the ultimate enemy: other reporters at other papers.

ROMAN MARS: And this is what I was hinting at earlier. I love this so much.

ELLIOTT KALAN: This is great.

ROMAN MARS: The whole part–I mean–this is the best part of this chapter, which is essentially them coming to the conclusion that, “well, if the editor is going to bury it here, I can tip off this other person and we can begin to sort of trade parts of these stories.” And they really do collude. It’s not just allowing it to happen. They meet and decide what’s going to happen.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, they’re meeting in bars and saying, “You take this part of the story. And then after you run that, I’ll do this part. Okay, and then you take this tip and you handle that.” It’s like insider trading between reporters, but in a way that there’s nothing illegal about it and it helps them. And Caro, every now and then, will indulge in a very kind of fanciful metaphor or description. And he has one here, and he just says, “Soon, like two flamenco dancers spurring each other to wilder and wilder efforts, Haddad and Gleason were both helping and striving to outdo each other, their stories picking up and taking off from each other’s and hitting harder and harder.” I love that. I’m comparing them to two flamenco dancers challenging each other. And they know that if their editors see a story about Title I corruption in another paper, they’re going to want them to get on it.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s like they’re bringing the spice back into the relationship between their editors and this story by cheating with another paper. And soon there’s this circle of reporters that are trading tips and things, strategizing how to get this done. And Caro says about these reporters–like you said, Roman, earlier–these are young people. They’re mostly in their 20s and 30s. They’re young enough that they are still idealistic. And they’re also young enough that the Moses myth does not matter. They were babies when Jones Beach got built. They don’t remember him as the hero of the working class and the liberal reformers. They know him as an old man–this stubborn old dictator who needs to be toppled. And they’re also too young to remember or have felt the threat of Moses ending your career when his bloodhounds go after you. They are fearlessly young and they’re also, in the way that can help a young person, kind of ignorant of history or the feeling of history in that what Moses means to them is Moses is right now and not what he used to be. And Caro–you can’t help but feel that he loves these men and women. And he glorifies them. And he notes, “Oh, they’re competitive. They want glory. That’s not all just sterling heroism.” But he mostly attributes their actions to their need to see Moses get justice for pushing people around. And again, if you’re making a movie of The Power Broker, don’t do it. It’s too big. But this could be a moment.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, this is the real kind of spotlight, having people spar with each other while trying to create the best story–meeting secretly. And it’s just great. And this is why the world progresses when old people step aside and new people come in. And it’s super important to have that in the world. It’s great that these guys have no memory or sense of Jones Beach or no fear. This is exactly what you need in a society. There are certain standard bearers that hold history, and there’s certain people that do not give a fuck about history. And it’s important to have all those people to make progress. And I love this stuff. It makes me very happy.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And as we’ve seen in the book, Moses used to be one of these types of people. And the other thing is that they are living in the world that Moses’ positive work has created. And so they can take it for granted. Moses’ fight years ago was people should have parks. This was a new thing. And now their fight is maybe people shouldn’t be pushed out of their homes. To make those parks, Moses had to ride roughshod over people. But now they live in a world with parks, and now it’s “maybe we shouldn’t ride roughshod over people.”

ROMAN MARS: I love this idea of this team of reporters. I think it’s just hilarious. And I think the part of me that gets nervous and nostalgic about this stuff is the fact that there’s enough papers and morning editions and late editions and stuff that they can be in conversation like this in a way that papers just don’t anymore. They just can’t be.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And knowing that, whatever they write, someone’s going to read it. Even if it’s buried in the back of the newspaper, it’s going to get to somebody. But there’s got to be new ways to do that–podcasts or whatever.

So, now it’s 1959. Moses is 70 years old. He’s seemingly still at the top of the New York power pyramid. He is basking in praise all the time. He’s raking in all his investment dollars for his projects. He’s easily reappointed as the state power authority. He’s on his way to building this massive dam at Niagara that Robert Caro never spends much time on. It is so massively important, and yet he never talks about it because it has nothing to do with the things he’s really talking about in the same way. And we have to thank him for that. You look at the book, and you’re like, “He must have left it all in. He didn’t make any decisions.” No. He did. He does not go into the story of this dam. I don’t care about it. Thank you. I don’t want to hear about it. I know it’s there. I’m sure there are a lot of struggles. I’m sure amazing feats of engineering were done.

ROMAN MARS: That’s right.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Don’t care. Thank you, Robert Caro, for not getting into it. I bet you probably that in his archives, at the Historical Society, there’s probably pages and pages about this dam.

ROMAN MARS: I’m sure there’s pages and pages. I bet you could write a whole book about what he discovered about that dam.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah. But that’s not a book I’m necessarily as interested in as New York City. I think there’s a feeling of what’s relevant to someone who lives in the New York area, which you could say makes the book a little provincial in some ways but also focuses the book quite a bit. There’s also a different version of this book. Robert Caro spends a lot more time on Moses’ itineraries–on his vacations. I’m glad we don’t have that. That’s okay.

ROMAN MARS: That’s right.

ELLIOTT KALAN: But then in February… So, Moses seems like he’s on the top of the heap. In February, one of the reporters writes a story about how Sidney Ungar–pretty good name–the man Moses picked to sponsor his Riverside-Amsterdam urban renewal project, is actually a politically connected slumlord. He is not a developer with a good track record, and he’s politically connected. And suddenly, the editors of these papers are afraid they’ll miss out on similar scoops like this. And now it’s not just that they’re listening to the reporters and saying, “Okay, you can look at Title I.” They’re assigning reporters to Title I projects to investigate them. And the stories are getting closer and closer to the front page. They’re on page seven, and they’re on page four. And finally, Moses is being named directly in these stories–directly in the headlines. And this is a longish excerpt, but I love it, so I’m going to read it. It’s got a lot of power packed into it. “In 1953, the Women’s City Club had issued reports disclosing that Moses had been shifting tenants in slum clearance sites to other buildings on the site.” And then he uses the word for “Roma” that I’m not going to use on the podcast, but it’s a book from 1974. “The reports had been ignored. In 1954, a minority report of the city planning commission had made similar revelations. That report had been ignored. But now in 1959, when J. Clarence Davies Jr., new independent head of the city’s real estate bureau, made the same report. It was, headline letters, ‘City Admits Shifts From Slums to Slums.’ ‘The press of the city awake at last,’ Fred Cook exalted. And he was right. The press had not been awakened by its owners… or by its top editors… It had been awakened by its reporters, not by its famous reporters, but by young unknown staff writers scheming together to force publishers and editors to do what the young men felt was their duty. But it was awake.” I feel like it’s such a powerful thing. They didn’t do it now. They didn’t do it here. They didn’t do it here. But these guys–they forced it to happen just through their sheer need for it to happen, in some ways, and their strategy.

ROMAN MARS: Just sort of ingenuity and sort of playing these different powerful editors and newspaper owners against their own insecurities about being the best paper–having the first story. They just were so smart about it all. I love it. I think it’s just hilarious and fun. And this is the part that I get really, really excited about.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And there’s a feeling– This is not kind of what we think of when we think of community activism in a way. But it’s the same basic principles of people working together for a common goal and using the tools at their command to make that happen. And it’s really– When it’s for a good thing, it’s wonderful. Thinking about it now, I could see the same techniques being used for a bad thing.

ROMAN MARS: Totally, totally.

ELLIOTT KALAN: But that’s the nature of tools.

ROMAN MARS: And as all these stories are landing, another great story that cannot be denied, even though the stakes are so low–the lowest in probably Robert Moses’s career… This is Chapter 44, Mustache and the Bard. It’s pages 1,026 to 1,039. This one’s pretty silly.

ELLIOTT KALAN: This is a silly chapter. The title is silly, and the chapter is silly. And I wonder if maybe that’s the point–that this is a small, seemingly trivial, not even necessarily misdeed of Moses. It’s, like, a miscommunication and mismanagement of a subordinate. And it leads to one of his biggest public relations issues. And I wonder if that’s the theme that Caro is getting to–that the little things end up being what trips them up. It’s not the big things. It’s not the systems that are supposed to keep people in check. It’s these little things, not because they affect the most people, but they affect things that the people in the media are interested in talking about and also things that have an intangible quality. Again, you can argue it’s too bad you have to lose your house, but we need this road. It’s hard to argue kids don’t need to play or that William Shakespeare is not good–that kind of stuff.

ROMAN MARS: Shakespeare was a communist.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, exactly. And Caro opens with an excerpt from the 1958 HUAC hearing where theater producer Joseph Papirofsky–better known as Joe Papp… Now, he’s known as Joe Papp everywhere. He will become one of the towering figures in New York and American theater. He’s being asked if he’s using Shakespeare to spread communist ideology. And the ridiculousness even in the transcript… The congressman who is asking the question seems to understand how ridiculous the premise is, even as he uses it. That ridiculousness goes through. And Caro opens it with almost an acknowledgement that this is an unfair story that’s being told–that this is the press and the public getting outraged about this tyrannical move of Moses’ when it’s really a fight that Moses seems to have not wanted and didn’t really have the stomach for and gave up on. But it still hurt his reputation so badly. And it seems like comparing that quote from earlier from Moses–it’s unfair, but it gets at a truth because, if ever there was a thing to get Moses on, it’s not this one. And so Moses–he’s always been a fan of Shakespeare. He wrote poetry in college. You know, he loves Shakespeare. Come on.

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

ELLIOTT KALAN: And in 1956, Joseph Papp–he’s a young theater impresario. He says to Moses, “Can I put on free Shakespeare plays in this amphitheater on the Lower East Side that the parks department built and that Moses built in part because Al Smith had told Moses, “When I was young, I could not afford tickets to the theater. I just couldn’t afford to go.” And Moses seems to admire Papp’s genuine interest in providing shows for free. And besides, the stage is empty all the time anyway. No one does anything with it. So why not? And Papp starts putting on productions there, and they’re very respected. The local audiences who cannot afford theater tickets love them. And this happens throughout history with live theater, but especially with Shakespeare; you show them to people who you think are going to be like, “This is too complicated, I don’t understand it,” and they love it. In the Old West, Shakespeare was incredibly popular. It’s writing that just gets to you, you know? He’s almost Robert Caro-esque in his ability to put words together. And Papp is like, “I want to expand these shows. I want to put them in more parks.” And there’s one person standing in his way. Moses gives permission, but there’s one person who doesn’t like it. Stuart Constable, the Mustache, who we already know is a foe of mothers. He doesn’t like moms.

ROMAN MARS: There is a kind of strain in these chapters of subordinates to Moses who don’t have any of his skill whatsoever. They’re as pugnacious as he is but can’t operate around people–can’t bully people the same way and make wrongheaded decisions. To his credit, in a way, Robert Moses has great loyalties to his subordinates. But they just don’t deserve it because they are kind of so boneheaded so much of the time.

ELLIOTT KALAN: You see it a lot in organizations where someone at the top has a special quality that has allowed them to create this position of power. And then the people underneath them try to imitate that or have been taught to work in that ethic and they just don’t have it. They can’t do it the right way. And we’ll see as we get through it, his loyalty to his subordinates, which would normally be a positive thing, gets him into so much trouble here. And this whole chapter has an element of farce about it. It’s written with a kind of the most winking that Caro gets throughout. And it’s a fun chapter, but this is the chapter I maybe have the most trouble with in some ways in the whole book.

ROMAN MARS: Oh, really? Oh, that’s so funny.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, we’ll talk about it. We’ll talk about it.

ROMAN MARS: Okay.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Partly because there’s– And we’ll get to it later, but there’s times when I’m reading it each time I’ve read it where I’m like, “Why is this chapter in the book? There’s all this stuff about Joe Papp and Shakespeare.” But I think it’s because of this larger point that I think he’s getting to.

But Papp proposes putting on plays in Central Park. And Moses is like, “That’s okay if you don’t charge admission for them. And this is a start of Shakespeare in the Park, which, again, for the cultural life of New York City, is one of–by this point, in the year 2024–one of the most beloved things going on in New York.

ROMAN MARS: Totally.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I have seen shows in that festival. I know friends of mine– I couldn’t do this because I had a job. But friends of mine would go. They would wait on line for hours because all you need to do is wait on line. You’d wait on line for hours. And I remember my friend being like, “Oh yeah, I was standing next to Mike Myers waiting for Shakespeare in the Park tickets for four hours.” That’s just what you do. And it’s first come, first serve. And it’s just a beloved event to a certain section of New Yorkers. And it’s kind of magical, when you are in the park, how Central Park even… It’s a safe park now, but it’s still scary to be in a park at night. It’s like you’re in the woods. It’s scary. And you’ve been raised on these stories of people being killed in the park. But there’s something magical about, when there’s a large group of people, seeing a performance. I used to see the Philharmonic in the park quite a bit, too. It transforms that space, and it takes a space that could be threatening and turns into this communal space that is magical and warm and what a city does best, which is take the fear of solitude and turn it into a shared experience with lots of strangers who become your neighbors. They become people that you know for a moment and have a connection to that otherwise would just be unknown names, unknown faces, and unknown lives. There’s something very magical about it. And Moses, to his credit, likes this.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, no, he is great. This is the sort of– He’s not a big fan of just wild glens and trees and stuff. But this is the type of thing that he is into.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes, you are using a space. He does not like unused space. And so, if you can use it and use it for something that no one else is doing with it, he’s for it. And he really appreciates the chutzpah that Joe Papp has in the way he fundraises for it. And Moses comes to see him–the book implies–as kind of a young go-getter like himself, who has a project that’s to help people and will go to any length to do it. By 1959, Moses–they’ve never met each other–is telling Joe Papp, “I’ll handle the fundraising for another season of plays in the park. I’ll take care of it. I like what you’re doing. Don’t worry about money.” And then he leaves town on a three week vacation to Barbados–another one of these long vacations that this workaholic is taking. Maybe he was taking more of them at this age. I don’t know. And unfortunately, he leaves things in the hands of the Mustache–Constable–who does not like Shakespeare and doesn’t trust Papp. And it only gets worse when he learns that Papp refused to name names before HUAC because Constable is, if anything, just a straightforward, anti-communist, steak and potatoes, New York guy with a big mustache. Later on, reporters are like, “Doesn’t this smack of McCarthyism?” And he goes, “What’s wrong with McCarthy?” And that kind of says everything you need to know about the Mustache.

ROMAN MARS: And so what the constable– Or not the constable, I guess. The Mustache Constable.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, his name is Constable, but I keep calling him almost “the constable.”

ROMAN MARS: He doesn’t like all these people using the park and maybe causing some maintenance issues with–I don’t know–sitting down on blankets or something like that. And so he says, “Well, what you got to have to do is you need to reimburse the park department for maintenance, and therefore that would require charging admission to Shakespeare in the Park,” which is against the sort of deal that Papp had made with Robert Moses about doing Shakespeare in the Park. And so it puts him in this bind.

ELLIOTT KALAN: He has promised, “I will never charge for Shakespeare.” And he doesn’t want to. But now he’s being told, “You have to.” And Constable is sure that Moses would be like, “Yeah, get this subversive out of the park. I don’t want him in there.” So it is one of those things where it’s like, “My boss did the exact opposite, but I know he really wants me to do this because it aligns with the values I ascribed to him. And it’s just foolish. Don’t do that, people. Just do what the boss did because that’s what they want being done right now. And you would think again that Moses would just overrule Mustache when he hears about it.

But, Roman, like you were saying earlier, one of these commandments that was ingrained in him in politics was you always have to support your subordinates. That’s how you get their loyalty. You make them feel like you have their back all the time. And in addition to that, if he says Constable is wrong, then it’s almost like saying he’s wrong because he has invested Constable with this power. So, if his whole thing is infallibility, if the guy he hired is wrong, that means he’s a little wrong. And so he had vowed publicly to a subordinates, “I will never overrule you, and that’s how I’m going to keep you loyal to me. I’m going to be loyal to you.” So, when Moses comes back, he backs up the Mustache and he refuses to talk to Papp. And the money he said he’d raise for the Shakespeare festival–that’s not happening. And Moses writes Papp a letter saying, “Well, for maintenance, it’s going to cost between $100,000 and $150,000 that you’re going to have to reimburse the parks department.” And this is 1959. I mean, that’s a lot of money now. That’s an astronomical amount back then. And Papp is trying to meet with Moses, but Moses is like, “I’m not in charge. Constable’s in charge.” And I wonder if here it’s a little bit loyalty and a little bit him trying to insulate himself from blame. “If there’s Constable between me and Papp, then Pap can’t get mad at me.” And Constable keeps moving the goalpost. He’s like, “You got to charge a $1 admission fee. And Papp’s like, “Okay, I’ll consider it.” And Constable goes, “Okay, then it’s $2 admission fee.” And Papp starts to realize, “This is not about money. This is about the mustache thinks I’m a communist, and that’s what it’s about. This is not a fair fight, and I’m going to have to fight it like a fight.” And so what does he do? He uses the same tool the moms use. He goes to the press. What does he do, Roman?

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, no, he goes to the media and starts to talk about Shakespeare. These are all educated people who love Shakespeare. They are now at a point in Moses’ career where the newspapers are criticizing Moses on a somewhat regular basis. And the funny thing here is he really goes for drama. He’s going kind of do the things that Robert Moses is known for–this sort of attack on character, different sort of innuendo, and different things to make it feel like there’s a lot of corruption here and that Moses is a kind of villain here. It doesn’t actually, I don’t think, really highlights his role in the beginning of making it all possible.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Not at all. He makes it into a play. And he’s quoting Shakespeare all the time, and the reporters love that. And Moses responds in kind, and he tries to go back to his old playbook similarly. And he starts these innuendos behind the scenes about Papp being a red. But that used to work. Times have slightly changed. This is not a time when it’s okay to be a communist, but Joe McCarthy’s been dead for a couple years. People look back at that as gross. They’re not like, “I love communism. Everyone should believe what they want.” But they’re like, “That was gross.” And so reporters, when they hear these rumors, say, “This is McCarthyism,” in a disapproving way. And just as with the first battle of Central Park, this story is getting simplified. Moses is the villain. He hates free Shakespeare–something that is objectively good. You cannot argue that there is a downside to putting on free Shakespeare plays in the park. You can’t. It’s impossible.

And the thing that they also do is they start to fact-check his claims about what’s going on in ways that they didn’t used to do. It used to be if Moses said something, that was the end of it. You didn’t question it. But now they’re questioning it. And once again, public opinion turns against him. And Caro points out that, in the past when there had been serious PR crises, Moses would get sick and be in the hospital. And the same thing happens here for reasons that are never fully explained. My pet theory is that he has a heart attack, but who knows? You never know. But he goes to the hospital. And Caro says that photos of Moses leaving the hospital make him look, for the first time, old–actually old–an old weathered man. And then Papp is like, “I’m going to put the onus of this on Mayor Wagner. Mayor, overrule these policies!” And of course the mayor is like, “Ugh, I’d love to. I’d love to just say, “Yeah, put Shakespeare in the park.” But he can’t overrule Moses. And it’s almost like, at this point, the mayor must’ve felt so annoyed. Moses is punishing the mayor just for considering it. He refuses to take Wagner’s calls. And Mayor Wagner becomes the subject of these joking headlines where Mayor Wagner will be like, “I plan to talk to Moses later. I can’t quite get him.” And so then there’s headlines where it’s like, “Mayor searches for Moses. Where’s Moses? Mayor can’t find him.” And if I was Wagner, I’d be so pissed that I’m not even in a fight with Moses–I’m in a fight with the Mustache and I’m looking like a fool because of a guy I shouldn’t even have to deal with. And he can’t fire Moses. And so Wagner has to then support him and say, “Moses is too valuable. I can’t do anything about it.” And the press plays it as Wagner giving into Moses. So again, if I’m Wagner, I’m like, “I’m losing a fight with the Mustache. This is ridiculous.” And ultimately, Papp goes to the courts. And a court finds narrowly, kind of for the first time, that Moses is being capricious with his power and that he cannot do that with the parks.

ROMAN MARS: And this is really stunning because this was a kind of thing that, in the previous court cases, the law was interpreted in such a way–written by Moses–that anything within the park walls and anything that related to parks whatsoever was the complete domain of Robert Moses.

ELLIOTT KALAN: He was the king of the parks.

ROMAN MARS: He could tear down any structure that he wanted–build any other one that he wanted. I mean, it was really… And for something related to ephemeral exhibition of Shakespeare plays, to think that this is the thing–that a non-permanent cultural institution or even just a cultural occurrence is the thing that stops him when it comes to court interpretation of what his power is inside of the parks is really stunning. This is a real change in his power.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s huge. And again, if you’re making a movie about Robert Moses, this is one of the things you do because the drama and the narrative is there–because it’s so simple. And it’s such an ephemeral thing. You’re right. But the story is so clear. It’s such a clear story. And the only thing that screws up this story dramatically is Moses probably not really wanting to do it.

ROMAN MARS: Exactly. Yeah.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Just as we’ve been yelling this whole series, “Why don’t you just accept his resignation?” there’s the part of me here that’s like, “Just do it. Just swallow your loyalty philosophy, and just do it because it’s so obviously wrong.”

ROMAN MARS: But maybe this is one of those things like if you eliminate the penny, people begin to understand that money has no meaning.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Money is not real. Yep.

ROMAN MARS: And it’s kind of one of those things. He knows that he’s so propped up in this system of you just support your guys… “The mayor just supports me. The governor just supports me. They trust me to do it.” And so I think that this is really something that he can’t possibly move on mostly because he knows that the whole structure that holds him in place is, at the base level, this thing of this idea of “I trust your judgment because you are you.” That’s what he depends on for the newspapers. That’s what he depends on for his relationship in politics as he remains this bureaucrat inside of this constantly changing political machinery. And so I get it. I get that this is the thing that he can’t change on.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It makes sense. It’s like when we talk to AOC–she was talking about how so much of politics is based on if you give your word, can you keep it? Do you have the power and the strength to keep it if you promise something or if you say you’re going to support something or go against something? And this is one of those times. You’re right. Yeah. He has to maintain that power of saying, “No, when I say something, it happens.” But Caro points out that, based on precedent, Moses could have appealed this court case and won.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, for sure.

ELLIOTT KALAN: But instead he says, “I’ll abide by the decision. We’ll have Shakespeare in the Park.” And he tries to arrange the money Papp needs to get the festival back into the park. And Papp only has time for one play; he puts on Julius Caesar. It’s a huge triumph. Everybody loves it. I think it’s very funny that he probably maybe did on purpose the story of a potential tyrant being taken down.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And Caro wonders–he says, “Why did Moses give up this fight when previously he had never admitted defeat so relatively easily?” And he says, “One explanation is that Moses could see the damage it was doing to his public image.” But Caro ultimately is like, “I think that Moses just didn’t want to fight this battle in the first place and got dragged into it because of Constable’s dumb choices. And he seems to have admired Papp so much that he let it happen.” And he eventually builds the Delacorte amphitheater in the park expressly as a permanent home for Papp’s productions. And so Sid Shapiro suspects and he says to Caro that he thinks Moses wanted to lose this one–that if ever there was a battle that Moses not just was okay with losing but didn’t want to win on the merits, this is it.

And Caro goes on to talk about Joe Papp. This fight was one of the best things that ever happened to Joe Papp. He’s the darling of the liberal elites. He becomes this institution of the theater world. He founds the public theater eventually down by Astor Place, which is still there. But for Moses, it’s another blow to reputation–another demonstration of just how much power he has over the mayor, which people are starting to realize. And the press turns further against it. They see that Constable is kind of this mini version of the boss–that his arrogance is just his boss’ arrogance. And now it’s not just the young go-getters who are looking to get Moses, it’s the establishment as well. And even the Times starts to investigate Moses’ Title I projects. And the new frame for the media isn’t “Moses the hero, who occasionally… Maybe– I don’t know if he’s wrapped up in something. We’ll see,” but “Moses the villain. Oh, what a tangled web we weave,” which is not Shakespeare. I should have had a Shakespeare quote. I don’t think it is anyway. I’ll look it up. I don’t think it’s…

ROMAN MARS: Well, while you look it up, we’ll play some ads and then we’ll come back with Chapter 45, Off to the Fair.

[AD BREAK]

ROMAN MARS: This is Chapter 45, Off to the Fair, which is one of weird chapters that sets up the sort of big deal that’s about to come, which is there’s just something that allows Moses to be kind of dislodged from his tendrils in everything because there’s this one thing for him to do.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes, this is the beginning of… You hear people say that things change very slowly and then suddenly very fast. This is the slower part of that change. And then the chapter after it, which we’ll end this episode with, is the fast change. And before we get into it, we do have unfinished business. I just want to say, “Oh, what a tangled web…” It’s Sir Walter Scott. It’s not Shakespeare. I apologize.

ROMAN MARS: That’s okay.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Another great UK author–another towering giant in English Language literature. But okay, we’re still in 1959 in Off to the Fair. It’s May, 1959, and the New York Citizens Union–it’s another one of these civic reform groups. Moses had been close to it once. They want to ask Moses some questions about his Title I projects. And he answers them in print, and he answers them very haughtily. And the newspapers would normally run those statements just as straight facts. They wouldn’t have questioned them. But now they’re going to look into them. And they point out he hasn’t been truthful about–say–who actually pursued that Manhattantown development. Moses leaves out the name of a graft crook and politician, Samuel Caspert, who’s going to be a big figure in that corruption scandal. And even worse, when asked if there are written reports about the bidders for the projects and whether those are available to the public, he gives this indignant response of, like, “Well, of course they are! And of course they’re open to the public! I’m offended you would even accuse me of hiding those things.” And the reporters–they see that and they are nearly orgasmic over this because this is the promise. “Oh, what he just did is gave us permission to ask him to look at the Title I files. These have been secret for years, and now we can finally look at them. This is amazing.”

And Caro sees this as a real tactical blunder. And he says, “Why did he make this tactical blunder? Why did he do this? He’s basically giving permission to have people come investigate him.” And Caro speculates that maybe he knew that legally he could not block them. Since slum clearance is a city committee, it’s not an authority. You can’t treat it like a private corporation. Or maybe he’d been so busy with the Messina and Niagara power dams–again, these dams that the book barely talks about, which are enormous, enormous projects that really take up so much of his brain space. We don’t hear much about ’em. Again, I don’t want to. He wasn’t paying that close attention to Title I anymore and didn’t know how damning the files were. This is at a point where he’s less than six weeks until the gala opening of the Messina Dam Nixon, the vice president’s going to be there. Queen Elizabeth II is going to be there. This is a big deal for him. He cannot let… I forgot the name of the guy from Tavern on the Green, but he cannot let him feed garbage to the Vice President and the Queen of England. He’s got to be on top of that. But Caro also talks about… Moses is undeniably at this point, for all the power he has always had for what a dynamo he is, an old man.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And he’s overseeing the parks department, the Long Island Park expansion projects, the expressways, the bridges, those big dams that, again, take up a lot more of his life than the book would lead you to believe… Maybe he’s just stretched too thin, and maybe he’s just trusting his own reputation too much. Maybe he thinks his subordinates can get in those files and strip anything negative out before people look at them. And so he delays letting people see them, but he can only do it for so long. And then finally on May 29th, 1959, he has to let these two reporters, who we didn’t mention in detail before– He says, “Okay, you can come to Triborough. You can look at those files.” And they go there. And they go to see those files, and they are salivating. They’re so excited about it.

ROMAN MARS: They’re very excited. There’s so many files. And they find nothing. They really find nothing.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It is such a disappointment for them. First, they have to wait for hours to get in. And finally they go in, and they’re like, “Oh boy, nobody’s looked in these files for 35 years.” And it is a real Geraldo with Al Capone’s vault situation, where you’re just like, “What’s in this thing?” And you open it, and all they’ve got are brochures.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah.

ELLIOTT KALAN: There’s formal memos. There’s nothing about the project sponsors. There’s a great detail in here that I love. They go to talk to Spargo, who is one of Moses’ right hand men. We haven’t talked about him a huge amount, but Spargo is a hugely important part of Moses’ operation. And Spargo is being so disrespectful to them that, while they talk to him in his office, he just keeps eating soup through the whole meeting. And I just love the image. It is hard for me to think of a way to be more disrespectful to someone who’s come to talk to you than to be eating soup. That’s a noisy thing to eat. It’s a sloppy thing to eat. So, even if you’re eating it cleanly, you’re slurping it. The only thing I can think of is if he was eating just a box of crackers and just spitting out crumbs at them the entire time–every time he opened his mouth. And Caro takes a paragraph also to talk about how shabby the reporters are and the used car they drive compared to this kind of neatly put together Triborough officer. And so it seems like this is a bust. These files seem like– They were so excited about them, and they’re kind of a bust. Do they give up, Roman? Do they stop looking through them?

ROMAN MARS: They do not. They’re real reporters. They keep going, and they turn every page…

ELLIOTT KALAN: They turn every page, in the approved of Caro manner.

ROMAN MARS: And they end up finding sort of, like, a smaller project called Mid-Harlem. They find this short letter of appreciation from Louis Pokrass, who is an associate of the mob boss Frank Costello. And then it begins to become like, “Oh, okay…”

ELLIOTT KALAN: “This is a real thing.” Nobody knows the name Louis Pokrass, which is a great name. It looks like his name is “Poker Ass,” which is a funny name. But Frank Costello has just recently been the star of these televised hearings that Senator Estes Kefauver did on organized crime. Everybody knows Frank Costello. It’s like Al Capone. If you have Costello’s name in some way connected to this, then it’s gold. And they find this handwritten note from Tom Shanahan, who we’ve mentioned in the past. He runs a big bank that all of Moses’ contractors have to park their money. And he says in this note, “I’ve been made aware of a delicate situation involving Pokrass,” but the sponsorship gets approved anyway. And this is a story, right? This is the kind of story they can do something with.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, it just has all the characters. It has all these shorthands for people to understand it without having to understand complex details of math and numbers and things like that. It just has Costello’s name on it and therefore it’s all of a sudden Title I and the mob. And it takes Moses to disprove that. You know what I mean? It’s more like it’s just set up to tell the story that everyone knows. And this is another one of those things where Caro goes, “I don’t know if this is exactly fair. This is levels and levels and levels down from actual Moses decision-making.”

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s very unlikely– It’s possible that he just handed this off to Shanahan to deal with and is not aware that someone with connection to the mob was doing it. And they find this other story where they find that Vincent “the Chin” Gigante–who was a former attempted hit man–was hired as a temporary night watchman. And it damages Moses. “Oh, this other mob associate was hired to work there.” And Moses is like– To be fair to Moses, Moses is like, “The man went to jail. He can’t get a job now. This is the lowest level job.”

ROMAN MARS: “He’s paid his debt to society.”

ELLIOTT KALAN: Like, a former felon was given a low-level job as a night watchman by a contractor hired by another contractor, hired by the project sponsor, who Moses didn’t necessarily hand pick. And it’s so super unfair. But the only funny thing about it is that, of course, Vincent “the Chin” Gigante goes on to be a major mob figure. They didn’t know that. They couldn’t have known this at the time, but eventually he is leading the mob in New York in many ways. And he becomes famous. I remember very well the years when–because it happened for decades–they used to call him “The Odd Father” because he would deliberately walk around in a bathrobe kind of mumbling to himself in public so that people would think he was crazy so that the feds wouldn’t charge him with anything. He did this for, like, 30 years. It was amazing. I remember when he died, they’re like, “Oh, The Odd Father’s finally gone.” But this just adds to more– They don’t know that he’s going to become The Odd Father, but it adds to the dirt in Moses’ reputation. Even this, which is the tiniest of things, you can still put in a headline. “Mob Hitman Hired on Moses Project.”

ROMAN MARS: That’s right. That’s right. So, this sort of stink of underworld stuff–it really just becomes something that he just can’t get away from. And now all these really tenacious reporters who have probably dug up worse dirt–things that Moses had a hand in directly–they see an opportunity here to just go to town on this stuff.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And they start finding it. They find real stuff. They find bribes to politicians. They find sweetheart purchases by the committee of land owned by local politicians. They find stories about crooked machine bosses being involved in the housing projects. And Haddad uncovers how important Tom Shanahan–one of the democratic bosses–is. And he’s the guy who qualifies developers mainly by getting kickbacks from them through his bank. If they put his money in the bank, then they’re qualified to do this, which means a lot of money for his bank, which means money for him. And the reporters are continuing that strategy we talked about of sharing information and doling out so that this paper gets it and then this paper gets it. And they are taking advantage. They’re using the inborn competitiveness of the papers to keep this going. And so much of this is now a matter of public record that the paper of record–The New York Times–they can’t ignore it. And they start doing a series of articles, not necessarily investigating, but synthesizing the information from the other papers’ articles.

ROMAN MARS: Classic New York Times shit right there.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah. Let’s get into this. Let’s get into this. This is an ax you’ve had to grind against them for a while?

ROMAN MARS: “We’ve just noticed this thing,” and it represents reporting from a million different sources and different newspapers already. But anyway…

ELLIOTT KALAN: But now that they’re talking about it’s real. It’s the exact opposite of the joke about the Times Style Section used to be, “Well, what are the friends of Times reporters doing these days? That’s the style. That’s what people do.” There was a… I loved it. There was an article–I wish I had kept it, I wish I had clipped it–that was in the Times Style Section years ago where they were like, “A new development among young Brooklynites–a new styles trend–the potbelly.” And it was like, “Well, no… Your friends are getting older. They’re gaining weight, and they’re carrying it in their belly. This is not a style trend. And they’re refusing to stop wearing t-shirts.” That was so funny. I got to find that in the archive somewhere.

Anyway, but now even the Times are on it. Tips are pouring in about Title I stories. And the older reporters–now they’re starting to help the younger reporters. They’re realizing that there’s something there. They’re late to it, but they’re there. And reporters are starting to notice the names of Moses associates on the payrolls of housing project sponsors of the developers that are doing these projects. And Caro takes a moment. He humanizes these reporters. He talks about how they feel sympathy for the families of these guys because they know, “We’re about to write exposes of these people.” They talk to a guy who they’re going to write an expose on, and they see a picture of his family on his desk. And they’re like, “Yeah. I feel bad about it, but this is the story. I got to run it.” I think what he’s doing here… I think Caro is trying to draw a distinction between Moses’ form of reputation-destroying and this kind of more principled form–that this is necessary, even though there’s something not great about the effects, rather than Moses, which are just for the sheer accumulation of power.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, this is a book really about journalism in a lot of ways. And he’s trying to just give a full picture of why this type of thing is better than the other type of thing. And these folks are not out to destroy individuals. They really are trying to take on a system, and these are the systems that need to be taken on. And these are things that Caro obviously cares about deeply–that these systems are challenged.

ELLIOTT KALAN: You could say they’re out to destroy one individual, Robert Moses. But at this point, he has become a system.

ROMAN MARS: Exactly.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And stories soon start breaking about George Spargo–who you may remember eating soup in front of some reporters–and just about how he’s receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in “consulting fees” from Moses authorities, while also being the director of this shady bank that we talked about a couple episodes back. It’s just he’s so close to Moses that you can’t help but put Moses’ name not just in the articles about corruption but in the headlines.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, which is what everyone reads.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Everyone reads the headlines. Yeah. I mean, you can’t help but glance at it.

ROMAN MARS: Exactly. You take it in.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s right there! And Moses responds with official statements, but that only serves him to tie him closer to the stories. And he strikes out at the press in petty ways. He stops telling them when committee meetings are being held. He locks the hallway at Triborough where there’s a vending machine that the reporters have been using to get snacks while they’re working. And the more he attacks the press, the more he gives them a reason to hit him back. He is now hurting them in a way that is making the papers mad at him.

And the Times starts having this divided relationship with him where it’s going to print these stories about problems with his projects and then print his reaction as news and is still printing editorial saying, “Oh, if Moses resigns, it would be an irreparable loss. You don’t bench Babe Ruth…” The owners at the Times–they’re still trying to keep their relationship with Moses. But the editorial staff–they cannot ignore these stories. There’s real news value.

And Caro is talking about how the new media–they’re chopping away at the supports of this Moses reputation. And he uses, again, that Moses quote from the chapter a little bit ago about the synthetic character of the statesman that was built up by the press and then deflated unfairly but truthfully. And he talks about how Al Smith had told him, “Popularity is a slender reed to lean on.” And he says, “Now, that reed was broken.” But here’s the thing, Roman… Does Moses still need to be popular to be powerful?

ROMAN MARS: Well, he doesn’t because he has already built up this war chest. He controls all this money right now still. So, this is a big deal. So, the PR love of the public–all that can erode because now he has this war chest. He’s already kind of abandoned the need for public approval a little bit before this. He’s never been quite a villain, but he just didn’t need people to cheer him on for him to do his things. But he still has this problem of everyone in politics needs jobs in their ward and to be reelected. And he still controls that money.

ELLIOTT KALAN: There’s still this unshakable logic–yeah–that real political power comes from money and jobs and being able to provide those. And he’s the only one who can provide them. And so the newspapers are like, “Certainly now the mayor will fire Robert Moses!” And of course they can’t. There’s just too much money. There’s too many jobs. There’s too much need for the political machine for that. And also that Mayor Wagner, if he can avoid it, is not going to fire anybody. He’s a guy who wants to be liked; he doesn’t like firing people.

ROMAN MARS: And he has this long-standing relationship with Moses. I mean, his father knew Moses. You know, it’s just–

ELLIOTT KALAN: He’s known Moses since he was a little boy. And he says at one point to somebody… I forget who says it to Caro. Somebody says, “You don’t fire your father. You can’t fire your father.” Like, Moses is a father figure to him in many ways. But even if Wagner did fire him from his city posts, Moses would still have five New York state jobs. He’d still be the chairman of the Triborough Authority, all firing him would do is make an enemy out of someone who is still massively powerful and still has access to all this money that Wagner believes the city needs. And so he can’t risk giving Moses a reason to throw his power behind one of his opponents. What if he endorsed someone in the next election and it wasn’t Mayor Wagner?

And the press doesn’t know any of this because they don’t have access to the documents that would show them how the Democratic machine actually works with Robert Moses. And Caro also says the press misunderstood the relationship because of what he calls “the wish’s predilection to be father of the thought,” which I think is such a beautiful phrase. And I don’t know if he’s quoting it somewhere–if it’s a famous phrase or whatever. But the idea that “I want this to be the case, so I think it is going to be the case–I am going to think it’s that way…” They want Wagner to fire Moses, so they assume that Wagner will do it and wants to do it. And every time Wagner stalls, the press takes that to mean that he will eventually do it–that he just hasn’t done it yet.

ROMAN MARS: It’s so fascinating. But one of the things that’s, again, a new thing–a new turn–in Moses, who’s now 74 years old, so… I’m glad he can learn a few new things.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, of course. Yeah. This old dog’s got some new tricks in him.

ROMAN MARS: He’s recognizing that the source of all of his misery is this Title I stuff. He knows that this is just out of control for him. He knows parks, he knows highways, and he knows dams apparently. But I don’t know anything about him knowing dams, but–

ELLIOTT KALAN: This book certainly wouldn’t tell you too much about it!

ROMAN MARS: He figures it out.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, you’re right. He was never really that interested in housing as a thing. He saw it as a source of power and a source of money. And now that money is starting to dry up and the power is starting to dry up, it’s becoming more of a hassle. And the press thinks, “Oh, Moses won’t let go of Title I housing. He just holds onto it with his vulture-like claws.” But the people around Moses are starting to become convinced that he doesn’t really want to do it anymore–that he would be happy to leave it. But he can’t do it while the press is hounding him or else it’ll look like they won. And the thing he hates more than anything else is to look like he’s losing. But wait. What if an exit strategy came along?

ROMAN MARS: That’s right.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Roman, what if a perfect exit came along? But what would that be? What could possibly be an exit would allow him to leave this realm of construction while still saving face and looking like it was his idea? What could that be?

ROMAN MARS: Well, it’s a brand new thing that everyone loves: The 1964 New York World’s Fair is coming. And they need someone who knows how to get things done and build things fast and take care of business. And he decides that if he can focus on that and let go of Title I, then he can sort of save face. He doesn’t have this– He’s not hounded out. He has this new, shiny new thing that only he can achieve. And therefore it just gives him a way out, making himself look good.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes. And there are even more reasons waiting. He needs money. He is a guy who– He’s 71 years old. He’s still supporting some of his children. His wife is in such bad health that she needs round the clock nursing care. He needs money, and he doesn’t make a lot of money from his jobs. That’s part of his whole thing. He’s the guy who doesn’t make money from his jobs. He doesn’t care about money! And the World’s Fair presidency, which is offered to him, would pay him a lot of money. It’s a pretty good job.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. I forgot about this part. But yeah, that is a thing. It has the sort of veneer of this sort of same civic duty because it sort of bolsters and boosters the New York area. These World Fairs are a very big deal. But this is a job job. This is a high-paying job.

ELLIOTT KALAN: This is a real job. This is essentially a private job. He’s entering the private sector in a big way.

ROMAN MARS: And it sets into motion this other thing, which is that it’s one of those things… Whereas he was able, way back, when La Guardia was trying to get him to be in charge of all of the parks and other aspects where he changed the law to both work in the state and the city and have these dual appointments even though they were in conflict to each other, this creates a conflict that is sort of untenable. He can’t be ahead of this private corporation and be the person who would approve those things. And it sets up a little bit of this unwinding of this rope that he’s built through all these different cords that is cuttable because he just has to let go of some of his public stuff if he’s going to be in charge of this corporation.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes, legally he cannot hold his city jobs and be the president of the Fair. And he sees that as, in some ways, a trading up. It is worth letting go of those things, which he feels he has expended a lot of the power from, for this new thing, which will bring in new power and new money and is also going to be more fun probably. This is the guy who liked making the Central Park Zoo. He liked making Jones Beach. He doesn’t love building public housing. And so it is a way, I think, in his mind, of cutting that Gordian knot. Yeah, he can unwind these things by just getting rid of the problem. And so he takes the thing that was hurting his reputation–Title I and his city jobs–and he trades them for this other thing that he thinks is going to build it back up.

And so he works out this arrangement with the mayor that they are first going to have a legislature pass a law exempting officers of the Fair from the city’s code of ethics, which should be a red flag right there. But then he starts resigning from his city jobs. He resigns as the city park commissioner. He resigns from the city planning commission. He resigns from the committee on slum clearance. He recommends that his job as the construction coordinator be abolished as it is no longer necessary now that he’s not doing it. And the press is like, “Oh, Wagner’s trying to push out Moses. But Moses is doing this all himself. He leaves in triumph from these jobs. And there’s this 1,044 person dinner where everyone pays a $100 a plate to be there. This is 1959. And the city’s power elite–they give him a standing ovation. He is leaving at seemingly the height of his power to take on this other stuff. He’s getting rid of the things that were hurting his reputation.

Not only that, his replacement at the parks department is this guy, Newbold Morris. Again, a great name. I love the first name Newbold especially because he is very much not a bold man and he does not have new ideas. And Caro portrays him as this, like, well-meaning bumbler, who is so eager to do whatever Robert Moses tells him. And he tells a story about a reporter calling Morris, and Morris says, “Let me call you right back about that.” And then the reporter calls Moses’ private number, which is busy. And then Morris calls him back and tells him what Moses told him to say. He immediately got off the phone and called Moses. Morris and Moses are even similar sounding names. And Moses still controls the federal and state highway programs in New York–

ROMAN MARS: So, what’s clear is the city stuff has all been resigned in order to take this job for the World’s Fair. The federal and state highway program stuff is still stuff that he has control of. But because so much of his power was drawn from having the connections between the two and that if he was let go of one he would be in control of another, it really does just erode one of the legs of his stool here by having this one because now, when it comes to state authority, there’s a new person in charge who can take that power away from him.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes. He’s got an accomplice. So, we’re going to meet someone in the next chapter, who’s a very fun person to talk about, who is going to be a little bit more than Moses can handle. But this guy has an accomplice, and that accomplice’s name is Robert Moses because, as Caro says, “only Robert Moses could lose Robert Moses’ his power. And he did.”

ROMAN MARS: Okay. This is Chapter 46, and it’s just called Nelson.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s not about the band Nelson. I’m sorry, everybody.

ROMAN MARS: It stands for Nelson Rockefeller. And–oh, my god–this is it.

ELLIOTT KALAN: This is it. Buckle up. This is the chapter you’ve been waiting for. You’ve sat through hours and hours of us talking, waiting for Moses to finally get what he was getting. And this is when he gets it. It’s Nelson. And so, yeah, the Nelson here is just Nelson Rockefeller. In 1959, he’s the New York governor. And Nelson Rockefeller, Car tells us, is a little different from the previous governors that Moses has dealt with. He is not quite the same type of politician. What’s the reason for this? Because Nelson Rockefeller, as you can tell from his last name, is enormously rich–like cosmically rich.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. Absolutely rich. And they’re basically– He mentions that the Rockefeller family has basically been bankrolling the Republican party. Basically, it pays for the Republicans. So, anything that they want to do–you know–it’s just up to him and his family. So, the idea that Moses controls a lot of money is just nonsense to him.

ELLIOTT KALAN: No, this is a guy… His grandfather was the richest man possibly in the world when he was alive. This is a guy who– Caro talks about how he has a ranch in Venezuela that is five times as large as the combined boroughs of New York City. This guy owns so much. His brother controls Chase Manhattan Bank–at the time, Caro says, probably the most powerful financial institution in the world. They have a controlling stake in Con Edison, where almost everyone gets their power from. They are so rich, and they have so many sources of power in a way that Robert Moses–just with his rinky-dink bridges, his authorities, and things like that–just can’t do it. This family is so powerful that Nelson’s brother–David Rockefeller–this lawyer is former governor Thomas Dewey. One of the major governors works for him. It’s crazy.

And so Nelson Rockefeller is like, “I want to be governor.” And he basically buys his way into the office. Like you said, if he tells the Republican party, “I want to be governor,” then it’s going to happen. But he also plays politics well. This is a guy–he’s going to run for president years later. He’s going to be vice president years later. He’s a real political figure. And he’s good also, in a way that other governors have not been, at visualizing the pros and the cons of big building plans. He can’t think of these big plans, but he’s really good at looking at someone else’s plan for a massive project and seeing what’s good or what’s bad about it. And he was really heavily involved in Rockefeller Center when it was a new thing, when he was 30 years old, when his father was building it. And so as governor, he has these big building plans that he wants to do. And so he has that in common with Robert Moses–that he has big infrastructure dreams.

What he also has in common with Robert Moses is he’s incredibly arrogant. He’s incredibly stubborn. And Caro describes it as “a serene sense that, because his motives are pure, his decisions are right.” He’s wealthy. He’s a wealthy man. He’s always been wealthy. He was born basically with the assumption “what I want is going to happen and I want it, so it must be the right thing. I’m going to get it if I want it.” And Caro says that Rockefeller’s arrogance is different from the abrasive, hard arrogance of Robert Moses. Robert Moses has this kind of, like, poking you arrogance. Whereas Nelson Rockefeller is the easy, gracious arrogance of someone who does not have to prove himself–who just takes it for granted. “You will listen to me.” And he is ruthless, but he’s ruthless in a way that assumes “I will win.” And it’s something that Robert Moses has never really had to face ever in his career.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what the two share is this love of cosplaying in a hard hat. They both love that thing.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes, that’s true. Neither of them are engineers or construction contractors, but they like to be around a site.

ROMAN MARS: And they understand the power of money. And what’s so funny is, up until the previous thousand pages, what Caro has really demonstrated is that these nickels and dimes–what a fortune they amass to make Robert Moses able to do what he has done. And then right at this moment, when Nelson Rockefeller enters the scene, all of a sudden they’re nickels and dimes again.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes. Yes.

ROMAN MARS: And it’s like, “You don’t understand what money is.” And it’s really something.

ELLIOTT KALAN: If there was ever a guy who was burning thousand dollar bills to light his cigars, it’s this guy. So, yeah, all the change that commuters are throwing in is nothing. And Caro says, “Survey the whole vast cast of characters on the New York political scene, and there was only one man who could, with impunity, confront and defeat Robert Moses, the man who is now governor.” This is going to be bad for Moses. And Caro’s like, “Moses should see this. He should recognize how tough Rockefeller’s going to be.” But the old Moses is no longer interested in understanding who he’s up against. And Moses and Rockefeller have a history. He’s worked with the Rockefeller family. He’s worked with Nelson Rockefeller. Nelson Rockefeller worked with him on getting the UN into New York. So, they’ve worked together. He thinks he has the measure of him. And Moses is in his 70s. Rockefeller is 50. And so Moses is like, “Oh, this young man–I can be fatherly towards him. I can assume his support because…” I think he kind of sees him like Wagner, where Wagner is like, “I’m a young man. Moses is an old man. I look up to him. I have to listen to him.” And the difference, again, is that Wagner is not colossally, globally rich in the way that Rockefeller is. And so conflict seems inevitable.

They’re huge arrogant fish in this New York state-sized pond. And there’s one early point of conflict. Rockefeller has this aide who’s a former NYU professor–go NYU, my alma mater–William j Ronan, who has sparred with Moses in the past and recommended abolishing the State Council of Parks and putting it under the Department of Conservation. And Moses is like, “Nope, that’s not going to happen.” And nothing happens. And I think Moses takes from that, “Oh, I can push these people around the same way that I pushed everyone else around.” But Rockefeller starts intruding on the territory that Moses considers his territory, essentially parks and Long Island parks especially. And Nelson Rockefeller’s brother, Laurence– His name is spelled L-A-U, like the fancy way of spelling Laurence–not L-A-W, like the normal people would. He starts getting involved in having the state acquire more park land. And Moses is like, “Great. I want more park land.” But in 1960, Rockefeller wants this massive state mass transit program put into place. And transit is Moses’ thing. And he makes Ronan, Moses’ new nemesis, his closest advisor and has him looking at this program. And the first big battle that’s kind of around these kind of shared interests that they’re going to squabble over is over Moses’ age. Like we said, he’s 70 years old at this point. When Rockefeller becomes governor, 65 is the mandated state retirement age. Legally, if you work for the state, you have to retire at 65 unless the governor signs an age extension and you can sign them for up to two years. And previous governors–they would sign them as early as possible. They’d sign them for two years. Rockefeller–he’ll only give Moses one-year extensions. And he always waits as close to Moses’ birthday as possible. So, in the days leading up to Moses’ birthday, which should be a time for excited celebration, instead he is agonizing over whether the governor’s going to sign this extension and let him keep his jobs.

ROMAN MARS: Which really begins to eat at him. I mean, you can tell that–or at least as Caro describes it–he is an older man. He’s perceived as an older man. He has these hearing aids. He can’t hear as well. They think that maybe this is one of the reasons why Rockefeller feels like he can do this. You know what I mean? The world is perceiving Moses as older, too.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yes. And I have to assume, when you’re in a meeting with Moses, he probably comes off as very old. Caro describes him as not really being able to hear what people are saying, so he just kind of assumes what people will say, which reminds me of a story about my wife’s grandmother. She refused to wear a hearing aid. At one point, she was eating dinner with their family, and her dad said something about like, “How’s the food?” And she said, “The doctor says it’s fine.” She was responding to the question she thought she was being asked rather than the question she was actually being asked. And it feels like Moses is doing that stuff.

And so, Rockefeller has this sense that “Moses has agreed to transfer the parks department to my brother Laurence.” And Moses has this sense that “that will happen way in the future, whenever I decide it.” And this comes to a head in 1962, the first appearance of Spider-Man is that year. Moses’ 74th birthday is approaching. And Rockefeller and Moses are having lunch to smooth over this disagreement over when Moses will transfer the state parks to Laurence Rockefeller. And nobody knows exactly what happens in this lunch. But Moses ends up storming out and Rockefeller goes out on the sidewalk and is trying to pull him back into the building. And Moses shakes himself out of his hands and gets in his car. And he leaves the governor standing on the sidewalk being like, “Come on. Come on! This is crazy.” And Moses tells Sid Shapiro. And he says, “Don’t tell anybody about this.” But of course, Sid Shapiro tells Caro because Sid Shapiro loves to talk to Robert Caro. Rockefeller said that he kind of holds up in his hand an extension of Moses’ presidency of the Long Island State Park Commission. In his other hand, he holds up this kind of transition of the State Council of Parks chairmanship to Laurence. And what Moses feels is this is a quid pro quo. “You’re saying you won’t extend it unless I sign this over to Laurence.” And Moses goes, “Well, maybe I should just resign all of my state posts then.” And Rockefeller’s like, “No, I just want you to resign the Council of Parks position. That’s all I want.” And Moses is like, “They’re all connected.” And he storms out when Rockefeller says, “Don’t tell anyone about this conversation.” And Moses, in his arrogance, is like, “Well, I defeated the governor. He wanted me to hand over this power. And I said, ‘No, I’ll resign everything if you make me do that.’ And he gave in because I didn’t do it,” ignoring, I guess, the fact that he stormed out of the building. He’s like, “I showed the governor a thing or two,” as if the conversation ended.

And he’s, I guess, hanging out with a friendly editor at the Daily News. And he says, “Hey, hey. You should arrange for a news reporter at Rockefeller’s next press conference to ask if Moses is keeping all of his jobs because that’s going to force Rockefeller to say, ‘Of course I want to keep Moses,’ because he doesn’t want me to lose those jobs. And he knows I threatened to resign all of them. So, if you ask him, it’s going to force him to say, ‘Of course I want him,’ publicly.” And back at Randall’s Island, Moses is refusing to answer the governor’s calls. He’s assuming, “If the governor is calling me, I’ve already won. The winner doesn’t call. The loser calls. He wants me back, and I’m not going to go.” And Caro says, “There’s every indication that if Moses had just stopped there–had just let it lie–maybe he would’ve won.” If it wasn’t public, maybe Rockefeller would’ve backed down from this transition idea. He had backed down from it in the past. So, maybe Moses thinks “this is just another one of those times where someone asked me to do something, I say that I’ll resign, and they stop. And the governor did it before, and it’ll happen again.”

But Moses–he pushes things too far. He wants to show Rockefeller how completely in control of the situation he is. He wants to force Rockefeller to surrender completely. So he writes a letter. Don’t do this. This is– Don’t do this. He writes a letter saying, “I’m preparing to resign from all of my state posts. This is what I am trying to do.” And he’s like, “I know Rockefeller. Now he’s going to call me again. I’ll finally take his call. He will say, ‘No, no, don’t do it. Don’t do it. We need you.’ And I’m going to just have defeated him. It’s what I do. It always works. It always works–all the time.” This is his ultimate weapon. It has never failed him. And Caro writes, “This time, however, the ultimate weapon misfired. After 30 years of issuing that defiant challenge, he had issued it to a man who would take him up on it. On the day after he received Robert Moses’ resignation, Nelson Rockefeller accepted it.” “I hope you’ll continue in the power authority post,” Rockefeller said. “As for the others, I note that you are making arrangements to resign from the Long Island State Park Commission. This is a decision which I accept with regret.” Roman…

ROMAN MARS: Oh my God.

ELLIOTT KALAN: What just happened?

ROMAN MARS: Someone finally took his resignation–took him seriously. They faced his ultimatum and said, “You know what? No… No.” Rockefeller accepted his resignation for the first time.

ELLIOTT KALAN: He accepted it. Instead of going, “Oh, no, no, no! We need you! We can’t do that!” he said, “Oh, that’s too bad. Well, I’m going to be sorry to see you go, but don’t let the door hit you.” This is the first time since he was on the Yale swim team that someone has accepted his resignation. For decades, governors and mayors have quailed in fear at the idea that he would ever resign. And now, so easily, he just gets a letter back being like, “Well, I see you’ve made those arrangements to resign. I guess you’ll do it.” Now, neither letter has been released publicly, so this whole thing could have been swept under the rug. But there’s rumors of the conflict that have leaked out. And Moses was like, “Oh no. I planted that question at the press conference where the reporter was going to ask Rockefeller if he wanted me to continue in all my posts. And now Rockefeller’s going to say, ‘No, he resigned and I accepted his resignation.’ It’s going to look like Rockefeller pushed me out! It’s going to look like Rockefeller fired me! I can’t let that happen. Oh, no, I can’t let that happen. That’s a nightmare scenario. Everyone’s going to know I lost to him.” So, he hurrily releases a public statement saying, “Nelson Rockefeller asked me to resign in favor of his brother, and I refused. And I’m so insulted that I’m resigning all of my state posts,” and inventing his grievance with the Rockefellers. And he’s like, “So, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to resign all of them.” And he says this publicly, thinking, again, that Rockefeller is going to be like, “No, no, no, no, no. I can’t be looked to have seen to be pushing you out in favor of my brother. No, no!” Rockefeller graciously, publicly accepts all the resignations. He’s clearly a little mad about the reference to his brother, but I don’t know. I’m not quite sure what Moses thought the governor was going to do, to be honest. Whatever he thought was going to happen, it didn’t happen. Moses has managed to checkmate himself out of power purely, as the way Caro says it, by sitting in his office worrying about what’s going to happen and assuming the worst and then making the worst happen.

ROMAN MARS: It’s really something. He just never thought that this would happen. And he had all these sort of things in place over his whole life that he thought he was sort of protected. And he is not in this situation at all. And I don’t know. It’s just like– I think one of the key parts of this is that it involves Nelson’s brother. You know what I mean? If it was another person, potentially, it would be like he might’ve bent or changed his tune to this. But this family? No one goes against this family. He must’ve just been like, “No, then just piss off.” You know what I mean?

ELLIOTT KALAN: “I don’t need you.” Everyone before him has felt, “I need this guy. I can’t afford to let him go.” And this is the first guy who says, “I literally can’t afford to let him go. I literally don’t need him.” If money is power, then it’s like Superman is going up against God. It’s not enough. And Moses has now, in that instant, mainly through his own actions, lost every government post he has. He still is the Triborough Authority chairman. He’s still president of the World’s Fair. He still has this informal role as New York City’s representative to the federal government on arterial highways–very exciting. But he’s lost most of his power. And Roman, you made this comment in the notes here, hearkening back to very early on when Commodore Vanderbilt said, “Hain’t I got the power?” And you say right here, “He hain’t got the power.”

ROMAN MARS: It’s just gone. He hain’t got it at all.

ELLIOTT KALAN: So, previously his power came from popularity and money. The popularity is long gone. It didn’t matter because the money remained. Now he’s lost most of that. The state power authority, which he has resigned from, even though Rockefeller kind of wanted him to stay on it, was about to generate tens of millions of dollars a year.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, these dams. Yeah.

ELLIOTT KALAN: From these dams! These dams that are so important that we never talk about. Why aren’t we talking about these dams? How come nobody talks about these dams ever? And now somebody else is going to get the power that comes with managing that money. And in public, Moses is like, “I’m glad to retire. I just want to retire. This is great.” But behind the scenes, his allies are furiously lobbying Rockefeller to bring him back. And in the past, this would’ve worked. But Rockefeller refuses. And Caro says, “For what might’ve been the one reason for Rockefeller to let Moses withdraw his resignation, not his parks council resignation perhaps but his others, did not, to his surprise and that of political insiders, exist. The expected storm of protest had not materialized. Robert Moses had been fired, and hardly anyone had really cared.” Moses is like, “Well, now that this is public, the public will rise up as one voice to demand that their champion be back in power.” And it just doesn’t happen. Even the Times–three years earlier, they had said, “You don’t bench Babe Ruth.” And now the Times runs an editorial that’s like, “It’s too bad. Moses is great, but no government function can be made so dependent on a single individual that he becomes the indispensable man.” They’re like, “Yeah, we still love Moses. But you know what? Maybe it’s time for him to go.” And this maybe is my favorite detail in the whole book–possibly. That’s not true, but it’s one of my favorites. Caro says, “Then there was this young reporter who was assigned to sit in the Newsday office over the weekend to compile the statements that were going to come in from public officials commenting on Moses’ ouster. And only one statement from a minor official comes in.” And then, in the notes, Caro’s like, “That was me. I was that young reporter.”

ROMAN MARS: In the notes, though. It’s not in the text.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s not in the text. He doesn’t say, “And when I was sitting there…” You got to go to the notes. The notes– Anyone who finishes this book with the last line of it–you haven’t read the whole book because the notes have a lot of great stuff in there. But I just love that it’s like, even before he has started to write and research this book, Robert Caro’s professional life is touched for this moment at the very beginning of his career with the very end of Robert Moses’ career. And there’s such a beautiful symmetry to that–that at the start of his career as a reporter, he is having this moment where he’s seeing the downfall of this man whose life will become the study of seven years, eight years of his own life. And the thing is, most politicians are not making statements. They will not go on record with public comments because Moses is not the powerful person that they need to be on the side of. Rockefeller is the powerful person.

ROMAN MARS: That’s right. They don’t know what tone to take when it comes to Moses. And so they just say nothing, which is, like, what Moses should have done.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah, exactly. And Caro talks about how there’s this illusion for years–decades–in political circles that Moses was so popular that you could not get rid of him. The voters would punish you so hard for getting rid of this man. And now the governor finally has done it, and nothing has happened. The voters do not care. If anything, they’re happy to see it happen–if they even think about it! And it feels like this is still the case in politics–that certain people accrue the myth of indispensability and then they lose power. And it’s like, “Oh, that guy? Yeah. Okay. And they probably could have gotten rid of him years ago.” And so Moses has… It’s almost the worst part of it for him probably. He’s not just, “Oh shit, I accidentally resigned myself out of all of my power for no reason,” but also, “Oh, and nobody even cares about it. I was used to being the axle that this city and the state turned around. And now, it just doesn’t even matter to people.”

And at the next State Council of Parks meeting–the first in the council’s 38 year history ever to be held without Moses presiding over it–they do name three parks after him, which is a big thing. And people close to Moses say that he is devastated especially to lose his Long Island parks roles. That was where he began. That’s where he first started accruing his parks power. But in public, Moses hides it. And the next time he sees Rockefeller in person, they hug each other, they praise each other, and he recognizes it. This is the power now. He is not the power. For the first time in decades, Moses has to swallow his pride because he does not have the power. And he must know in the back of his mind, “Boy, I really shouldn’t have done that. This is on me.”

ROMAN MARS: And they take all that sort of looming character of Moses–it just becomes a kind of figurehead. He doesn’t knock down, and then everyone… They don’t string them up like Mussolini or anything like that. They transmute him into this other type of elder statesman to be revered in this way but definitely not to be feared.

ELLIOTT KALAN: No, they defang him. He goes from being a vital, powerful, dangerous figure to being kind of like New York’s construction grandpa. He doesn’t matter. You don’t have to have an opinion on him. He’s around. You can revere him without it really meaning anything, or you can ignore him. And it is probably the thing that would be most painful for him–to be not just out of power, but to be unimportant, obscure, unnecessary, and just kind of easy to not even pay attention to. And that’s unfortunately eventually going to be his real ultimate fate. But look, he’s still got that World’s Fair going on. There’s still that.

ROMAN MARS: That’s true. There’s still a glimmer out there–the World’s Fair.

ELLIOTT KALAN: So, maybe if he manages this World’s Fair just right–if he makes it a roaring success–maybe he’ll be back in power. Maybe that’ll happen.

ROMAN MARS: This is his last–

ELLIOTT KALAN: Maybe he can do it!

ROMAN MARS: This is it. This is his chance. We’ll cover that on the next episode where we will also finish the book! We will cover Chapters 47 through 50. I cannot believe that we’re almost through the end of this. This is amazing.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s astounding to me. I look at my copy of the book that has my notes in it. And I look where the bookmark is. And I’m like, “There’s not… Wait a minute. There’s so much book before the bookmark and not a lot afterwards.” What an amazing journey and a wild ride this has been. But we’ll talk about that more. I can’t believe it. Finishing the book, we are not going to go through the notes in the podcast, so you’ll have to do that yourself. We will end at the last line of the text.

ROMAN MARS: That sounds good. Coming up, our conversation with Brennan Lee Mulligan, host of the Dungeons and Dragon Show, Dimension 20.

[AD BREAK]

ROMAN MARS: And now our conversation with Professional Dungeons and Dragons dungeon master Brennan Lee Mulligan. His D&D show, Dimension 20, on Dropout TV has a very large and devoted following. And pretty much since we started the show, listeners on our Discord server have been asking us to have Brennan on as a guest–all because of one reason…

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: Our big bad–our villain of Season One of the Unsleeping City–was none other than undead Robert Moses! Oh no! Here he comes!

ELLIOTT KALAN: Just when we thought we were through with him. Finally, with this episode– Finally!

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: Robert Caro’s going to have to pop back up and get that pen out and start writing, baby. There’s new chapters. Here we go.

ROMAN MARS: That’s right. Brennan created the Unsleeping City and made the main villain a fictionalized magical Robert Moses.

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN (DIMENSION 20): You see Robert raises his hand. a seam opens in his wrist, and a rope of blood shoots out of his arm around the child. And he rips the child out of the mirror, as it skids onto the floor in front of you…

ROMAN MARS: When Brennan develops his stories for Dimension 20, he pushes the bounds of traditional D&D campaigns. His first season was called Fantasy High, which Brennan describes as a “John Hughes movie with swords and magic.” But there’s something very different about looking to The Power Broker for source material. So, we talk with Brennan about why he decided to pick Moses as the inspiration for his big bad D&D antagonist and how one goes about creating a fantasy version of a very regal, very bureaucratic man. But first, a quick primer on Dungeons and Dragons for those of you who may not be super familiar with the game.

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: Dungeons and Dragons is a storytelling game where one person is the dungeon master who writes an adventure and their friends are the players. And they each have one character. So, basically you have a group of heroes. Every hero is being played by one person at the table, and their job is just to go on the adventure, roleplaying as their hero. And the dungeon master’s job is to be everything and everyone else–all the monsters, all the allies, and all the environs. And basically you’re just going on an adventure. It’s group storytelling. You’re collaboratively writing this adventure improvisationally in the moment. And the game aspect comes in in moments of stress, risk, and uncertainty. Do you go into combat? Do you slay the dragon or does the dragon devour you? We’re going to roll dice to find out. Do you crack the code in the massive spell book, or do you raise your fist to the sky and shake it and say, “No, I cannot decipher the codex”? That’s a dice roll, right? So, all these moments of dramatic peak are determined by rolls of the dice, which creates this really wonderful feeling–whether you watch D&D shows or you play D&D–where you are watching a story being told by people who love telling that story. And the intoxicating part is not only do you not know where this is going to go, the people telling the story are discovering alongside you where the story’s going to go.

ROMAN MARS: So, we have a Discord server where we talk about the book and stuff. And you came up very, very early in discussions of who should we have as potential guests because a lot of people who listen to us enjoy your show. And the idea of Robert Moses–the Robert Moses in this book–morphing into a fantasy villain… And he is morphed quite a bit. We should explain a little bit of that. It is kind of genius, and it’s just sort of fun to sort of bring the real world into this fantasy world and play with that. So, let’s first talk about who Robert Moses in Unsleeping City is. Let’s describe him a little bit because he’s a little bit changed.

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: Yeah. I would say that he is a very fantasy villain version of the historical figure–and one very much sort of taken up with presumably the decades of whatever his public historical life was. We’re now in the year 2019, after decades of magical shenanigans going on in the fantasy universe. I should also mention that, in terms of license with real figures, we did have Stephen Sondheim as an ally of the player characters, who wielded two broadswords, one in each hand. So, there was a little bit of creative license with some of our beloved New York–

ELLIOTT KALAN: Because he was usually a one-weapon fighter–Stephen Sondheim.

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: Yeah. In real life, he was a sort of saber or rapier– He was a one-hand fencer. But we thought it would be fun to take a little license, so we gave him two Claymores. But Robert Moses, as he’s depicted in the Unsleeping city, is the architect of a thing called the Highway Hex. And the Highway Hex is, if you guys are familiar at all with the concept of leylines–which are basically magical directional veins that can intersect and create nodes of power– And it’s sort of based on some real world belief systems. And the idea behind Robert Moses in the Unsleeping City is that the Highway Hex was him creating a complex arcane ruin–a glyph–of the intersecting highways and expressways within New York City to repel divination from the forces of good. So, he basically remains a master builder–remains someone whose ideology is very rooted in the concrete and building and the creation of an infrastructure–with this added level of arcane, magical threat on top of it. All of the traffic in New York is actually casting this elaborate, fiendish spell.

ROMAN MARS: Right.

ELLIOTT KALAN: So, this version of Robert Moses, when Robert Caro’s interviewing him, would point out to Fire Island and say, “Don’t you see there should be a glyph there? Shouldn’t there be a glyph out there?” But you’re saying it’s still rooted in the things we know about Robert Moses–about his predilection for slashing roads across everything. But you’re giving him, if anything, kind of a more rational reason.

ROMAN MARS: I know. Exactly.

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: We’re explaining, in retrospect, why he was so obsessed with building all these expressways.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I get why his road has to take a sudden curve in through East Tremont if it’s because we’re drawing some sort of sigil or some sort of a cult sign and it has to be exactly the right way. It makes more sense than any of the reasons that we got otherwise. I’m very curious about your– So, you’ve read The Power Broker, I believe.

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: Yes!

ELLIOTT KALAN: You’re not just existing off of the urban legends of Robert Moses. It strikes me as such an interesting book to use as a foundation text for a fantasy story because it is so grounded in many ways–the real kind of minutiae and data of urban construction, traffic flow, and things like that. What is it about it that planted this into your mind that, like, “yeah, I could use this for a D&D campaign?”

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: It’s a great question. And there’s a lot– So, I have an odd biography. I went to school a little bit early. I had started attending college at SUNY Ulster when I was 14 for philosophy and humanities. I remember as a teenager reading Howard Zinn, which is a very similar book in terms of like, “Oh my God, this is 80 pages on these many bushels of barley were being exported and were tabulating the economies of this portion of time.” And then we’ll move to a page where you’ll read a chapter that makes you burst into tears, where the human cost of all of this data is rendered very plainly.

And to be honest with you, a lot of the Unsleeping City that first season was rooted in and very much dedicated to and sort of honoring my father. So, I’m a New Yorker. My father’s lived in New York my entire life. And we would walk around during my childhood, and he had this incredible– His name’s Joe Mulligan. He had this encyclopedic knowledge of New York history. We’d go to museums or go up to the cloisters or go downtown. He took me to Five Points when I was a little kid but before Gangs of New York came out. And we laugh about it now because he would point somewhere and be like, “And this is where Bill Poole came out and this is what happened…” And he’d be pointing at a Dunkin Donuts. This is the site of ultimate significance. And prior even to reading anything about Moses–you’re right, urban legend is a good way to put it–my father, as a New Yorker, spoke about Robert Moses with this idea of “this is someone who forever altered the city” and explaining the heights of bridges and the discrimination of keeping various groups out from– “These people will have luxury and plenty, and these people will not.”

In terms of what drew me to this document and this extremely– If you were being honest, the crimes and the social ills of this guy are so fascinating in that the greatest harm is done through these things that require a kind of pointed attention to understand what’s happening. It’s not salacious. It’s not this thing where it’s like the big harms are done by manipulating authorities and manipulating money and manipulating power. And I think it was looking at a setting set in a magical New York and specifically dealing with the idea of how you fight somebody who’s not even interacting with you. They are in control of the environment. And your conception of freedom–your conception of what individual action can be–is totally put up against this guy, like you’re saying, from source material that is very, very rooted in infrastructure, administration, and bureaucracy. So, you want to have this big fantasy showdown, and it felt like the right way to do that was with a guy with this massive history of extremely dense action that was taken at this level that most individuals don’t know how to oppose.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s something that ties into the episode we were talking about today. We talked about how the reporters, who were trying to make it clear what Moses was doing, were having trouble communicating it to the public because it was so complicated and it was not salacious. And what they finally got traction with was they hired an ex-mob guy as a night watchman. So the mob’s involved. And it seems like it would be a big challenge in creating that kind of a traditional fantasy adventure climax when you are dealing with somebody who himself is not a conniving villain so much as… I guess he is pretty conniving. But he’s not so much a cackling evil villain so much as– I guess he kind of does that, too. Nevermind, nevermind. It makes more sense than I thought.

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: I will say, there’s a lot of meat on the bone. He really did give us a lot to work with for sure.

ROMAN MARS: I mean, I was actually thinking of–rather than the incongruities of the text and then your storytelling built on top of it–some of the congruencies, which is, like, the idea of Robert Moses being able to write these laws over the course of the first couple of decades of his life that give him power for the remaining decades almost seems like a wizard. It almost seems like a magic spell that he has done to create and accumulate and build and build and build–the same way that you level up and build in D&D. It has that quality of a wizard in a way.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Yeah. Well, you could look at The Power Broker as kind of a real world version of all the things that happened with Sauron before, The Lord of the Rings–all the things that happened in the past, where he amasses this power because of secret knowledge and because of the artifacts of that power and then has this period of dominance and then has his downfall more because of his own overreaching than because of anything else. I mean, you have to assume that Sauron would not talk himself into resigning because he’s worried Nelson Rockefeller is going to make him look foolish at a press conference. But–I don’t know–it could have that way, too.

ROMAN MARS: It could happen that way

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: “As the wizard Gandalf, I call a press conference… The Dark Lord…” I totally agree. And I think that there’s a part of depicting Moses in the Unsleeping city, which was showing– Especially because of who our heroes were… So, like, the heroes of our party are people– Lou Wilson’s character, Kingston Brown, is a nurse in Harlem who is a fixture of his community and knows everybody in the city and is tapped into those communities and working people. Ally Beardsley’s character is Pete Conlan, who’s a dream sorcerer who’s a part-time drug dealer in the art scene in Bushwick. So, you have these sort of New Yorker staples that are all from different walks of life. And the idea of you’re making this point, with this group of characters that become our heroes in this story that are all magical New Yorkers, of the power of not only community, but the power of diverse community–the power of… What’s the word I’m looking for? Multiculturalism. Or the idea of a big pluralistic society and the idea of there being– And there definitely are forces at work against that. And there are definitely depictions in the season and elsewhere of that kind of know nothing nativist, where it’s meeting a cultural force with an opposing cultural force and saying like, “Okay, you want a pluralistic multicultural society. We don’t. We want homogenous and this one tight and sort of nativist ideal.” But that’s one way to oppose that.

The other way to oppose that is to sidestep culture in totality and go, “Hey, you can believe what you want. I’ll shape the city without any worry about–” In these chapters that you guys are talking about, the funny thing is how long protests had been trivial to him. If you know how to actually move power around, if people are paying your tolls, and if people are giving you this power and energy outside of their belief system just because driving on your road, how much of their buy-in do you really need on that cultural level? And that’s so sinister to me–that idea of manipulating. Like you’re saying, it’s a wizardly thing; it’s manipulating a system of power where you’re like, “I don’t need to interface with you. I don’t need to be in conversation with you. I have mastered a secret language, whether that’s law or finance or, in this case, the bonds being issued to the authority.” You memorize this, again, lingua arcana. And all of a sudden, it doesn’t matter. You have sidestepped that entire frame of reference–up to a point, of course. But that’s what’s so interesting about that metaphor to me of the city authority as wizard–as someone whose power does not reflect interaction with large groups of people but rather with systems that people are supporting unbeknownst to them.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting. So, the story is that to gain his power, he sort of sells his soul to different factions–to hell and to the fairy. And then he builds the Highway Hex as a way to kind of insulate him. Then at that point, they all come in after him. And he’s trying to keep them out. And that sort of action of being surrounded by highways just disrupts their ability to sort of go get him. And so he’s basically remaking the city in this selfish way. He’ll put the misery on everyone else to circle this city and circle this city forever just so he can’t be gotten at by demons who are, I guess, worse than him in some way. Again, it’s a nice way to embody this–put a story on this very sinister thing to remake something without any sort of input from anyone else. To just destroy a place just to make yourself safe is diabolical.

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: And the fact that everyone knows in the setting. They’re like, “Oh yeah, big celestial or fae or infernal forces can’t come to the city.” Everyone knows the ramifications. But it’s a discovery in the midst of the season that that is because of this Highway Hex and it’s to protect one individual. And you go, “So, you’re saying the entire shape of my cosmology–how I understand the magical world to work–is not some massive– It’s not like that’s been here. Maybe that’s why they built the city here.” No, it’s one guy’s actions that reshaped everything. And I think the moment– Obviously, again, we have a very fantastical villain in our Robert Moses. He’s way over the top. But as far as villain goes, he does attempt a lot of persuasion and flattery. He really tries to get Ally Beardsley’s character–tries to make Pete Conlan into a Moses Man.

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN (DIMENSION 20): “You got fucked, kid. I’m sorry.”

ALLY BEARDSLEY (DIMENSION 20): “What do you mean?”

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN (DIMENSION 20): “Well, did you sign up for this Vox Phantasma job? Did you weigh the health benefits? Did you get a choice in the matter?”

ALLY BEARDSLEY (DIMENSION 20): “No.”

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN (DIMENSION 20): “No.”

ALLY BEARDSLEY (DIMENSION 20): “Does it suck to be the Vox Phantasma?”

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN (DIMENSION 20): “What do you think? You’re homeless. You got a bunch of problems.”

ALLY BEARDSLEY (DIMENSION 20): “That’s just New York.”

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: I think there’s one confrontation towards the end of the season where I was like, “If there’s anything that feels like a statement towards the historical Moses that feels really pointed, there’s a confrontation between him and Kingston Brown at the Temple of Denver at the Met.”

LOU WILSON (DIMENSION 20): “I hate to say it, Mr. Moses, but they’re all free-thinking adults who can make their own choices–as is every person in this city.”

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN (DIMENSION 20): He says, “You think people make choices?”

LOU WILSON (DIMENSION 20): “I do.”

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN (DIMENSION 20): “No, people think they make choices. They think they’re going to steer right or steer left, but they didn’t build the roads. The big choices already got made for them a long time ago.”

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: And that to me is, like, the heart of his sinister philosophy in the Unsleeping City. And as someone who– I come to this as a philosophy major–as someone who studied philosophy. The impact that he had on this country–forget just New York, but the country broadly–is so profound. And America, I think, has a cultural love for the idea of individual freedom and the idea that freedom is a substance that lives in the individual and your ability to be a heroic cowboy figure who does whatever the hell you– No one’s going to tell me what to do. It’s very rooted in the American thing. The rug is totally pulled out from under that philosophy if you have to reckon with the fact that life is multiple choice–that you are not born on a blank page. You were born into the context that has often been shaped by very powerful people.

ELLIOTT KALAN: I want to point out for anyone who’s listening who is not a New Yorker, when you mentioned the Temple of Denver, I want people to know that that’s a real Egyptian temple that’s in the Metropolitan Museum, not a fantasy, like, Magic Temple that they’re going to. And it makes me think about how there are viewers of the show who did not know that Robert Moses was a real person when they started watching it. And has that been a surprise to you? You see it on Reddit–people are like, “Just found out Robert Moses is real. I thought he was his character in the story.” Does that make you feel like you have more of a responsibility to present him more authentically than as a magical monster man?

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: Me and the guy who puts the facts on the Snapple caps–we get together and kind of commiserate.

ELLIOTT KALAN: The other responsibility of it–that comes with that power. Yeah.

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: It comes with that power. Yes. I think that there’s a very pointed feeling of anytime you’re doing anything connected to historicity or historical– You know, I think a lot of the players in that season who had not lived in New York also felt like, “Oh, how do I honor this very real place?” And we had, you know… Stephen Sondheim was mentioned there. In the second season, there’s a fight at Ellis Island where people are jumping into photographs from Ellis Island of different waves of immigration in the city. You’re trying to honor these things not only in a fantasy show but in an improvised fantasy show, where it’s like, “Well, our first priority is to make sure that our story reflects our values and is compelling and interesting and funny.” And I think people finding out that Robert Moses is real through this–I can only hope that it shuttles them on to The Power Broker and to reading the history. Please don’t take the headline from an improvised D&D show. Please feel free to dig deeper because there’s a lot more information. And obviously a lot of our information was very much taking the character as a point of inspiration and then doing this big arch villain version of him.

In the second season, they spring a creature out of this dragon’s cave underneath Central Park, and literally the Tammany tiger jumps out–who is a giant blind tiger with, like, cuffs and a top hat with a shamrock on it. But I would hope that people would not see that and then go, “Oh, Tammany Hall! That’s where that tiger is, right?”

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. Colson White had wrote about this–that when he was growing up, the Underground Railroad was an actual railroad in his mind. He could not escape that image. It’s one of those things. It’s kind of funny how you get information like this. And I think it’s awesome that people learn about Robert Moses through your show because, I mean, there’s definitely a lot more to dig into. But it’s just a great… You take this sort of gestalt of this big book and kind of go, “Well, these are the things that speak to me about this–this idea of choice taken away from you and places being shaped for misguided and selfish reasons.” And it is a way to describe the world as it is.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s also part of the irony of history that Robert Caro feels the need to write this massive book–this incredibly researched book–in order to tear down the myth of Robert Moses. And now 50 years later, there’s people who are like, “That was a real guy? Huh…” Robert was so omnipresent in New York that Robert Caro had to marshal so much argument to show that he was not doing good work. And now it’s so around the opposite where people just are like, “Oh yeah, that’s that villain on that fantasy show.”

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: I mean, that’s a fascinating thing is the idea of Robert Caro, who, I mean, like… I can’t think of a more– We talk about the influence of Robert Moses. The influence of Robert Caro–growing up in New York–not one time did anyone ever go, “You know, Bob Moses got a bad rap.” No– That book just decimated that guy! I mean, Robert Caro is the definitive last word on Robert Moses’ legacy. And if people are unaware of Moses and become aware of him, there is a degree of, like… Probably the first thing you hear is some apocryphal, boogeyman-style story that sort of reflects or echoes something from the book. Or at least that’s been my experience with people finding out about him. They’re like, “Oh yeah! That’s the guy”! And the first thing they’ll tell you is one of the excoriating pieces of evidence from the book rather than “that’s the man that built America!” or anything like that.

ELLIOTT KALAN: “Jones Beach Robert Moses?”

ROMAN MARS: So, this is sort of the end of our series. We are in the fall of Robert Moses–the Fall From Power… Or is it The Loss of Power.

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s Loss of Power. Yeah. I mean, so you have to wait till the evening to know how good the day has been. And we’re getting into the evening. The sun is sinking down. We have one more real summarizing episode left.

ROMAN MARS: And what’s so fascinating about his fall is that, through some sort of machinations of wanting to control the World’s Fair and therefore giving up some of his city posts and then, in a fit of pique, resigning as a bluff to his state posts and then finally, for the first time in decades, after doing that over and over again, Nelson Rockefeller takes him up on it and he actually gets forced out of his state posts. And it’s a pretty like-a-whimper, ignominious end to his reign. That is not how your Robert Moses meets his end. And in a way, it’s satisfying because you see the beats of it. And so as a story, it’s really fun to watch this resignation tactic finally not work. But it doesn’t have the kind of sort of oomph that you kind of want. So, describe the fight and how they ended Robert Moses.

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: The big villainous schemes– I mean, this is as animated and over the top as you can get. Robert Moses and his army of vampires–his army of vampire financiers–concoct a ritual at the New York Stock Exchange, which our heroes are unable to stop, on New Year’s Eve. And a disembodied Sauron-esque Robert Moses retreats to the ball drop in Times Square. As the ball drops, there’s a lot of magic having to do with the Golden Door and Lazarus, the New Colossus, and the idea that in order to basically extend his sphere of influence from New York to the rest of the country, Robert Moses is going to summon the American dream. He’s going to summon the embodied version of the American dream. And the danger of bringing a dream into the real world is that, the second a dream becomes real, it becomes one thing.

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN (DIMENSION 20): When you call a little wish or a figment into the waking world, it can become a spell–a moment, a flash, a joke, a little bit of joy. There are dreams that are so large and important that they represent a threat to the cosmos if they are brought into the waking world.

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: And while a dream is a dream, it can be anything. And there’s a lot of fairy logic to that. But what, I think, it means more pointedly for Robert Moses as the master of concrete and steel and the idea of concretizing something is the idea that the American dream is at its strongest or best when it is interpretable and where it means something different to everyone who wants to pursue it. And by bringing it into the real world and putting it under his control, he will forever kill every other version of it.

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN (DIMENSION 20): You see the tendrils of Robert’s spell and the infection set in. The dream warps, convulses, has its last moment where it could be anything, and begins to take a solid, stationary form. A tall, clean-cut, square-jawed, blonde-haired, blue-eyed man appears hovering in the air above you. It surveys what it can see of the city, the sidewalks, the subways, the buildings, and the billboards, and in a resonant voice goes, “This place is filthy…”

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: So, that poetry aside, all the good guys jump in a big tornado in Times Square. This is where we move from the poetic into the insane and literal. They jump into a bunch of floating, concrete sidewalk platforms, fight the American dream, defeat the spell that Robert Moses is casting, and sunder him and break his stranglehold on the Unsleeping City forevermore and send the American dream back through the golden door into the land of dreams.

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN (DIMENSION 20): You glow with the power of the chosen one. And the frozen flame flies back into the Golden Door. Robert screams, “Noooooo!”

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: And that’s the final battle! And I will say, it is a lot more final than the accepting of a resignation. That’s for sure, right?

ROMAN MARS: So, if you end the book reading the book and you’re like, “I really wanted something– I really wanted a good punch to the nose of Robert Moses here,” you can read the 51st chapter, which would be the Unsleeping City.

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: Exactly. Dropout.tv. And I will say this, we have a lot more spells. There’s also a tiny, little fairy mobster called Don Confetti. And he talks like this. So, where’s that, Robert Caro? “Where’s that in the book?” I ask you.

ROMAN MARS: So good. So, when you presented Robert Moses to your dream team who are your players, did they know who Robert Moses was? Did you know their level of familiarity with the character in the real world?

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: I did not. The crew knew, obviously–the people that I’d been working with developing the storyline knew. But yeah, I believe that a couple of them did actually know that Robert Moses was a real historical figure.

ROMAN MARS: And did that change the way that different people interacted with him? You’re all telling the story together, and you have a master plan and a guide–not an Un-Moses-like master plan for how they’re going to navigate this space and this story that you’re telling. But they do have input. And did you notice that different characters interacted with the villain Moses differently if they were more familiar with New York and what he did and that sort of thing? I just wonder if there was any sort of breakdown of pattern.

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: What’s interesting is the awareness came out in the midst of the season, so it was not like a difference between cast members in that some immediately clocked him and some didn’t. It was more that, as the season was shooting and it was clear that this was a real historical figure, that pointedness, I think, developed more–to the point where I think that final confrontation at the Met has a really great part of it where Lou’s character, Kingston, has basically heard enough. There’s a sort of silence or gravitas to that scene where knowing the sort of horrifying power that this man wielded and his utter remorselessness for the most marginalized communities that were impacted over and over and over again for decades–I think that there was a degree of gravitas that is added by that. And there’s this weird delineation, I think, in storytelling–especially fantasy storytelling–where villains either are misunderstood and they have a point and they’re three-dimensional or they’re, like, mwa-ha-ha, like Maleficent. “I am arch evil!” And I weirdly think that you get some of both those worlds in an instance where there’s nothing more three-dimensional than a real human being. But it almost makes it worse. The idea that someone had a complex inner life and had emotional wrinkles and depth to themselves and was this heartless for this long, wielding this much power, is astonishing. And as the PCs were clocking that, I actually think it gave them a measure of resolve, even as the villain was not a total cartoon, right?

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. I’m just going to add a little annotation here that “PCs” in this context is “player characters,” right?

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: A “PC” is a “player character.” Yes.

ROMAN MARS: Yes. So, that means that’s part of the group of this collective storytelling game enterprise that you’re telling.

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: For folks tuning in. And–again–if you’re listening to 99% Invisible breaking down the Power Broker, I’m sure you’ve played tons of D&D. They have, right?

ROMAN MARS: It’s a decent crossover. There’s probably plenty who don’t, who are just, like, into history stuff. We were debating this–about how much to describe what D&D is–because obviously there’s different sections of the world who know different things, for sure. But for example, when I was talking to my kids–I have twin 17 year olds who are very into D&D–and I mentioned that I was going to talk to you. And I said, “Are you familiar with Brendan Lee Mulligan’s work?” And they were like, “He’s only the greatest DM in the world–probably of all time!”

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: Oh man! That’s so sweet. That’s very kind.

ROMAN MARS: So, they’re the people who know both because I talk about The Power Broker endlessly and they watched Unsleeping City as it came out. I was aware of it.

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: Wow. Wow, wow, wow. That’s incredible.

ROMAN MARS: So, when you’re devising something as complex as Unsleeping City and you have some designs where you want to lead them but they have their own agency to a certain degree, how do you balance that when you’re telling something that’s complex? The idea of the Highway Hex and the American dream stuff–it’s just complex ideas. At least they seem to me to be that way. How do you do that?

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: I feel, Roman, that I’m being set up for an analogy where this very much mirrors Robert Moses. And I want to tell you that I see the trap. I see that you’re laying it out here, okay? I’m onto you, man.

ELLIOTT KALAN: That’s very smart of you. That’s why you’re a good DM. You can see the game behind his DMing in this interview.

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: I see the game, man. No, but you’re very right. There is a fascinating– Well, I think that in the language that Robert Moses uses a lot to talk about… You know, he’s talking about Long Island and he’s talking about “what are the kinds of people we want to attract?” That’s the language he uses. But there is a darkness and a cynicism when you understand that individual freedom written over massive populations and a powerful incentive structure is fate. Free will over the aggregate becomes fate when you incentivize strongly enough. And that’s really sad. And it challenges a lot of our deeply held ideas about the power of individual freedom. And so, to answer your question, on a DMing level, sadly, it’s the same necromancy–it’s the same magic–where you are kind of building these tracks. You’re building this thing where you go, “Okay, you can do whatever you want. But I know what you want.” It’s like when people are seeking a stimulus. I don’t mean this as a disparagement of players, but to use a metaphor that there’s, like… You have cheese at the end of the maze. You don’t have to seal off the maze. You don’t have to trap anyone in the maze if you know that they’re looking for the cheese, right? There’s this element of when you’re building adventures and you’re building even these complex ideas in there, you make something very personal. You make something where it’s like, “Well, this person has this villainous ideology. And that ideology has resulted in concrete harm to a loved one, or it’s resulted in something that is very visceral and felt to my character.” And the best way, honestly, to create these story structures is in collaboration with your players, which doesn’t mean that you’re what the story is going to be. But there’s this beautiful– When I talk to novice Dungeon Masters about how to construct adventures and flow sheets and sequences of events that your friends will feel compelled to improvise through, it’s always the idea of the motivation and heart of your players as they’re embodying these characters has force and inertia to it. It’s like water flowing downhill. You can irrigate a hillside to know where the water is going to go. And it’s not a reflection on the water doing what you told it to. It’s a reflection on you understand that these people are pursuing their aims rationally. And if they’re pursuing their aims rationally, you can create the structures that direct those aims.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Brennan, you’re not going to like this, but talking about knowing what people want and using that as leverage to get them to do what you want them to… It sounds like power brokering, to be honest.

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: No, man! No!

ELLIOTT KALAN: It sounds like you’re doing a lot of power brokering. Yeah.

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: Come on, man! Don’t do this to me, dude! You can’t do this to me!

ELLIOTT KALAN: It’s almost like “DM” stands for “Dungeon Moses.” Hold on a second.

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: No!

Suddenly my disguise fades away. “Curses!”

ELLIOTT KALAN: “It was him the whole time!”

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: “It was him the whole time!” Yeah, it’s very… I don’t know. It’s genuinely a joy and privilege to be able to write these kinds of stories. And I think, too, in our first season, Robert Moses was such a fun, compelling villain for the historicity and how much history mattered and was important. And I think, too, in the second season that we did as well, urban fantasy is so interesting in that you’re often depicting both at the same time. You’re depicting the heightened fantastical reality as well as what is actually the mundane reality on the ground.

Our second season, we had sort of a large company called Gladiator that was trying to open a campus in Queens. And this was around this idea of a big conglomerate shipping e-commerce company. And it was summoning this extra dimensional being called Null. And that season was very much about the emptiness and urban isolation of hyper consumerist capitalism. And so you’re depicting these things where there’s this haunting entity in the dream world that’s coming out. It’s, like, a faceless, colorless silhouette–very lovecraftian. But then also you’re looking at an apartment complex with no one living in it because all of the apartments have been purchased as basically asset class investments. I think there’s some crazy percentage of apartments on Central Park that are vacant for more than 80% of the year.

And so it’s a fun thing in crafting these stories, especially in any kind of setting, like the Unsleeping City, that’s so contingent on the real world and is very much depicting that, where you’re like, “Here’s the metaphor and here’s the reality and here’s both of them hand in hand.” You know what I mean? It’s not just the analogy. The analogy is here with this other component that is real. It’s a joy. It’s a real privilege to be able to tell these kind of stories. And speaking of New York, we’ll be coming to Madison Square Garden in January, which is nuts.

ROMAN MARS: What?

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: The Dimension 20 is going to be performing January 24th at Madison Square Garden. We sold out the Garden. So it’s a–

ELLIOTT KALAN: Congratulations.

ROMAN MARS: That’s awesome.

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: Thank you! I appreciate it. Again, having grown up in New York, it’s a very…

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, it’s amazing! Yeah. Love it.

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: It’s nuts. It’s nuts.

ROMAN MARS: Well, I mean, thank you so much for being on the 99% Invisible Breakdown of The Power Broker. It’s been real pleasure, and it was really… It’s just fun. I hope people who are interested in D&D–or even if you’re not–just check out the season. Watch it unfold. It’s a really fun take on the underlying concepts and values of the book. This is great. You added to the canon.

ELLIOTT KALAN: And thank you for using your medium to spread the word of Robert Moses and The Power Broker to those who were previously not aware of it but are pretty interested in digging into lore. So, I think they’re going to enjoy The Power Broker when they finally get to it. Yeah.

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: I’ll say, if you love lore, Robert Caro’s The Power Broker is chock-full of lore, my friends.

ROMAN MARS: Chock-full of lore.

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: That’s how we make a difference. We start referring to history as “lore.” We’re going to get a bunch of people. It’s truly a pleasure and an honor to be on the podcast today, and I really hope that anyone who is coming here from Dimension 20 digs into not only the rest of The Power Broker, but the rest of 99% Invisible.

ROMAN MARS: Oh, thank you.

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN: All the things that I talked about that matter to me–I feel very much like, if I can do anything as a comedian and storyteller to direct people towards these things, learning about Robert Moses as the villainous, arcane architect of the Highway Hex is hopefully step one on people digging into not only the history of Robert Moses in New York, but the people, wherever you live, the city that you’re in, and who is shaping the environments of your life. And is there a way to get active in resisting whatever Highway Hex is being implemented in your town right now?

ROMAN MARS: Nice. Well said.

ELLIOTT KALAN: Next month–and I cannot believe what I’m saying right now–we are going to be finishing the book. Forget page numbers. Just read it till the end. Read the book till there’s nothing left in it to read anymore! We’re there, people! It’s the home stretch! And if you can’t wait till next month to hear my voice summarizing something, why not turn to The Flop House Podcast, where we never reach the end. There’s always more bad movies to talk about. It’s an unending torment.

ROMAN MARS: We’ve got a bunch of 99PI Power Broker merch for you to congratulate yourselves on making it this far. There are T-shirts, there are bags, there are bookmarks, and there’s something that we’ve been waiting to tell you about. We have a 99PI Power Broker challenge coin. It’s a commemorative coin. It’s totally Power Broker-themed–a prize to get yourself to show to anyone and everyone that you finished The Power Broker. You’ll no longer have The Power Broker book as this totem that you’re lugging around. And you’ll now have this coin to commemorate that you are a true Power Broker nerd. The coins will be in the store soon if they’re not there already by the time this episode comes out. Just head to 99pi.org/store to get one.

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: 9% 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 we have fun discussions about The Power Broker, about architecture, about bad movies that seem somewhat inspired by The Power Broker, and all that kind of good stuff. It’s where I’m hanging out most of the time. You can find a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI, at 99pi.org.

DIMENSION 20: The banality of evil… That is so goddamn boring. Of course the most evil guy is the guy that built the highways. So dull!