The psychopath who wrecked New York

Robert Moses was the man, they say, who built New York. He was never elected to anything, yet he had absolute control of all public works in the city for more than 40 years, until 1968. His record was mind-bending. He personally conceived and directed the building of 627 miles of New York parkways and expressways, seven of New York’s bridges, the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and the entire Long Island highway system; he built the Lincoln Centre arts complex, the United Nations, Jones Beach Park, JFK airport, Central Park zoo and the Shea Stadium; he built 658 playgrounds, 11 swimming pools, 673 baseball pitches and cleared thousands of acres of slums; he put up tower blocks for hundreds of thousands of families; he created vast acres of state parks and the Moses-Saunders Power Dam on the St Lawrence, one of the world’s engineering wonders.

Yet for all his mighty achievements, he is largely unknown in Britain. Partly because his reputation in America was demolished way back in 1974 by a mighty 1,300-page book by Robert Caro called The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. As Caro tells it, Moses took power by seeing power where others hadn’t – in the boring agencies of state government that ran the parks and roads. As head of the innocuous-sounding Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, he received every toll paid on every road and bridge in New York, a vast income that was immune from government interference. Moses used the revenue to build other toll projects, a cycle that would feed on itself, giving him control over all of Gotham.

His working life – he routinely put in 17-hour days – was facilitated by a vast expense account with teams of secretaries, chefs and chauffeurs. He died in 1981, aged 92.