By the time Nelson Rockefeller ended his "public" career, Robert Moses was the most hated man in American history.

The power Moses wielded will never be put into the hands of one individual again.

Third, with respect to civil service, knowing the limitations of the system, Moses built his empire outside of it (Triborough was not covered by the Civil Service system during his tenure). He positioned himself as the can-do guy in oppostion to the feckless permanent government institutions he actually created. But civil service is really a very small part of the pharmacopia of poison pills he planted in New York. Contracting rules, bond covenants, Federal aid legislation, land use rules, mapping. Inside knowledge of that stuff is what he used to his greatest advantage.

And check your namesake's publications again. So far as I know he didn't concern himself with the exploits of a naif from outer space.

Eddie - By selflessly I meant that the earlier era Moses worked for no money, city or private, except for family support. Lots of rich people (Bloomberg) do it like that. The dirty little people who wanted political friends to get them government jobs were his enemy. There was a lot of the holier than thou reformer in him in that era. That reminds me of a lot of the NIMBY-BANANA development critics out there.

I didn't get from the book that the arc of Moses' career included a decades long strategy of building a civil service system that he would later be able to exploit. I got that he was a clever guy who adapted to power to amplify his own power and thereby get things done.

And, I never said the civil service system was even a mixed blessing, I was actually sort of lamenting the passage of Tammany Hall as an engaged political community. I've tried to cajole good folks who read this blog into building up their own political clubs. If Vito Lopez can do it so can Aaron.

And, I don't find any of my nom d'plume's ideas to be in any way pejorative. The Little Prince is all about applying political power. In the transportation context that means ultimately that the desires of the abutters will have to submit to the greater good. If you are going to wait for a consensus of citizens from the point of origin, citizens at the point of destination and the citizens abutting the transportation way there would never be anything built or operated. Only when a political entity can speak for the best interest of all, and get it done, can the civic good be accomplished, especially with regard to transportation.

The problem with the Moses legacy, and Caro's book is that it has undermined civic trust at all levels. When Moses was running Tri-Bourough he did have the trust of the New York Times, the Building Trades, the Democrats and the Republicans and most of the citizens. It is only in retrospect that he became the icon for the civic distrust and cynicism we know today. And as indispensable as Caro's book is he must take some of the credit for the cynicism and sarcasm that blankets our community boards today.

When Rockefeller pried TBTA toll revenues from Moses' white knuckles he created the first Congestion Pricing program that now Bloomberg, another very wealthy Republican, hopes to expand. What is absent from the equation now is any political party or organization behind Bloomberg. In there place is the "whole public review and public hearing process (that) has become a playground for pompus anti-anything naysayers, "populists for hire," and worse."

There's something to be said for giving more voice to people who have a strong connection to the community, and who have put a lot of work into serving it. But the current system goes too far.

Fortunately, New York's waterfront highways aren't freeways (or expressways). They are parkways, and thus are set income with landscaped verges, with recreational facilities, and beautiful park infrastructure. What's more, they are co-owned by our Parks Departments, which once had sole jurisdiction and benefited from their toll revenues! Our generation is now confronted with a choice -- do we let these parkways continue to spiral into freeways (following the recommendation of TA to open them to trucks, for example, which means even more straightening, widening, fortifying with concrete and chain link), or do we restore them to parkways, enhancing their waterfronts and greenways and restoring their beautiful and historic stone bridges and promenades? Isn't it time for TA to revisit this issue, and see the inconsistency in their position on cars in parks and trucks in parkways??

What's a BANANA?

Look here if you really need to find a playground uptown (there are lots). Robert Moses even built some of them.

http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_things_to_do/facilities/af_playgrounds.html#sites

Niccolo: "Moses, selflessly committed to righting the wrongs of Tammany Hall"

that's a stretch. He worked within Tammany Hall (literally and figuratively) and presided over excesses of patronage throughout his career. He just did so _effectively_. Caro's thesis in part is that Moses set out to remake government into something he was uniquely suited to exploit (by virtue of having written most of the rules in a way that only he understood), that this started in his earliest days as an aide to Al Smith, and that there was nothing selfless about it.

Yes, Moses was instrumental in the replacement of the spoils system with civil service. However, as anyone who has worked in government can tell you, this is a very mixed blessing. Civil service is the main contributor to the sclerotic ineffectiveness of government in New York, and has been for decades.

Even as Caro lays out the standard narrative of "young Moses good; old Moses bad", he undermines his own thesis with anecdotes of Moses's early (ahem) Macchiavelian exploits.

I've always been ambivalent about the Power Broker. It's a tremendous source of information, and a tour de force of research. But it's soooo repetitious and stylistically overwrought. Easily twice as long as it needs to be to convey the same information and perspective. Ditto for his biography of LBJ. Amazing how much copying and pasting he managed to do in the days before computers and cheap photocopy machines.

Or maybe what we need is Tammany Hall pitching for Congestion Pricing. Maybe his murder of Tammany Hall through the dispassionate human resource science of civil service examinations has made the creation of a truly urban political power impossible. The forces of urban political castration set in motion by term limits have permanently empowered the NIMBYs and BANANAs. It may be that it took an upper class twit Ron Lauder to finally drive a stake in Moses' heart.

I personally find Lincoln Center anti-urban and unpleasant, and I agree with Jane Jacobs emphatic further criticism that it makes no sense to agglomerate cultural institutions in one place rather than weaving them into the urban fabric throughout the city.

The idea that we need another Moses is pure bunk of the most obnoxious sort, and Bender does an admirable job demolishing it. The fact of the matter is, congestion pricing IS getting spearheaded--by an elected official with vision who is accountable to voters, ie not a Moses at all.

Moses is a tragic character. So incredibly effective; unfortunately, he was often very effective at creating negative things.

I hate many of the things the man built, particularly the elevated and sunken expressways that destroyed whole neighborhoods, but you have to admire the man's capability. His impact on this city is nothing short of breathtaking in its scope.

That is true of some Moses parkways, but certainly not of all the freeways he built: witness the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the Gowanus Expressway, and the proposed cross-Manhattan Expressways that were stopped by that horrible public process that the Moses-Revival criticizes.

Would New York be a better place if those three cross-Manhattan Expressways and Moses' proposal for Westway had been built?

On the contrary, New York is a better place because the public process stopped them.

In San Francisco, they stopped freeway construction sooner, and San Francisco did not decline in the 1960s and 1970s, as New York did. San Francisco is thriving, even though it did not allow a local Robert Moses to arise, so it is clearly false to claim "the thriving New York of today would not exist were it not for the hard-nosed autocrat's bulldozing brand of tough love."

In fact, the thriving Soho of today probably wouldn't exist if Moses had built an elevated expressway through the middle of it.

I would like to see an anti-Moses to tear down lots of his remaining freeways, starting with the Sheridan and the Gowanus.

And we need a process that is long term and incremental.