The Power Broker

"this book is considered the quintessential book to read if you want to understand state and local politics, especially power-wielding in New York"

"Well, if you look at a picture of a place, you can normally get a sense of what it’s like. But hopefully what books do, or what thinking does, is to show you what that place is like underneath. The Power Broker is the definitive history of how, in modern America, cities get built, power gets thrown around, neighbourhoods are overpowered by developers and politicians. It’s gigantic and it’s a biography, but it reads like the most epic novel of building and money and power. It’s by Robert Caro, who is a master biographer; he went on to write a definitive biography of Lyndon Johnson. And it’s about Robert Moses, the most influential builder and urban planner in the city in the middle of the century. He just decided he was going to do things, change the shape of the land and build a ton of roads and bridges. Whatever you see in the city that is the city—the shape of the city, the body of it—was his doing. It’s like being in a surgical theatre, when they pin the body open—you’re the medical student up top, and you’re watching, and they show you: ‘Look, this is the lung.’ And there are incredible battles of incredibly powerful people. For example, Robert Moses had a major fight with Franklin Roosevelt before Roosevelt was president, about where they would build these parkways. Roosevelt wanted the Taconic, and Moses wanted another kind of parkway system, so he fought. In most cases, he was able to steamroll everybody and advance his own power. Moses comes off as a villain—although I wouldn’t say exclusively. He obviously accomplished a lot of important things, but he was a problematic figure in power. Recently, people have been saying: look, he was able to keep things going, to keep bridges up and keep potholes filled . . . So in the last ten to fifteen years, there’s been a swing back to crediting him. He was able to maintain some things that have proven harder for other people to maintain. He really wanted to get things done. When people who aren’t here think of New York, they think of the bridges and skyscrapers and the bigness of it all. But how does it all work? This is a great book for understanding how it came to be that way, what the monuments are and who was behind them. Very problematic, stubborn and sometimes crazy people, but people still."

"an extraordinary achievement that should shame the hundreds of reporters and editorial writers who naively glorified Moses over the decades."

"I'm about to start Robert Caro's Robert Moses epic, The Power Broker."

"I had a vague idea of Robert Moses' history of road-building in New York but had no idea that he basically created the entire New York parks system and all that it entailed."

"I often find myself returning to books because of prompts from news events (The Power Broker, by Robert Caro)."

""The Power Broker," by Robert Caro. Fascinating history of Robert Moses and how he shaped New York City. It's also about politics and how power is amassed and urban planning and engineering."

"describes how bureaucracy and power can create beauty, function and opportunity while also serving as a reminder of the casual cruelty of racism, classism and rank arrogance."

"I'm on the bed of a dorm room that is cold because I unknowingly left the window cracked open all winter, reading Robert Caro's "The Power Broker," a book that was much too thick to open when a professor assigned it but now that class is canceled by a student strike I have time."

"The section on Jones Beach may be the most extraordinary chapter of nonfiction prose I've ever read."