I've often had opportunity to muse that the real legacy of Robert Moses

[conuly]

is that people still complain about him decades after his death, but I still didn't expect to encounter it twice in two days. (All complaints about Robert Moses are undoubtedly valid.)

Comments

[redbird]

I ran into some people complaining about Robert Moses in my current book, but the setting was Manhattan in the late 1950s, and the character was thinking "oh good, I know what they're talking about now." (Cat Sebastian, _We could be so good_)

[lilysea]

who was Robert Moses?

[conuly]

Robert Moses, for better or for worse, built post-war NYC.

Most people who talk about him would say "for worse". The man never saw a neighborhood he didn't want to raze for a highway.

[lilysea]

At first I thought you meant "post US civil war" and then I got to "highway" and realised you probably meant World War II

[redbird]

"Post-war" is World War II, yes, I'm not sure how much of that is because of the broader US "lots of highways built after that war" and how much is more local. New Yorkers also use "pre=War" to mean apartment buildings built before the war, which tend to have higher ceilings and thicker walls between apartments than post-war construction.

Robert Moses was powerful in/around New York City from around World War II until the early 1970s, I think. If you've heard of Jane Jacobs (Death and Life of Great American Cities) she helped stop Moses from bulldozing part of a residential neighborhood in lower Manhattan in toder to build a highway through the neighborhood.

[altamira16]

No one ever reads this book because it is 1300 pages long, but a lot of people sure talk about it. Robert Moses did a lot of urban planning in New York, and something about the bridges in New York being short, so the busses can't get to the beaches.

People who speak fondly of Olmsted usually need to knock it off too.

[conuly]

To be fair to Robert Moses, I don't think he was more racist than his peers.

[altamira16]

Yeah, urban planners of the early 20th century were racist. When someone points out the racism, you realize that it was there all along, and you never noticed, which is how racism works. I think Vox did some videos on redlining.

[foms]

I read it.

[rebeccmeister]

Okay, this is hilarious. Thank you, as I continue to remember him pretty much on the daily for the interstate that cut off Albany from the Hudson River.