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was unique in his ability to dominate the building process, but he was also
aided by the extreme decentralization of New York City politics, its weak
mayor system, and its lack of home rule. all of which helped to create power
vacuums that he immediately filled . Moses built more and more quickly than
anyone else , but many of his projects would eventually have been built
anyway, even without him .
In the course of his career, Moses made innumerable enemies, not only
among the displaced poor , but also among other New Yorkers who were left
without the facilities and services, for example hospitals, which could not be
provided because so much of the city's budget was preempted by Moses'
projects . Eventually, their protests caught up with him , and Moses' power
began to decline in earnest after Lindsay was first elected mayor with the help
of a sizeable ghetto vote. Moses contributed to his own demise by allowing
highlyvisible corruption in his urban renewal projects , and once the reporters
had uncovered it, they revenged themselves , in Watergate style, for the many
ways in which Moses had attacked and shackled them for over a generation.
Nelson Rockefeller finally toppled Moses , although not because he was
hungrier for power , as Caro suggests, but because he had the backing of David
Rockefeller , who represented the bondholders , and because he was willing to
continue to build , thus obtaining the allegiance of Moses ' supporters, and
making Moses himself superfluous.
IfCaro is wrong to argue that Moses alone caused the fall ofNew York , he
is also wrong to insist that New York has fallen. Caro's own vision for New
York is a high-density city, with as few automobiles, expressways and suburbs
as possible , but the suburbanization of the city began before Moses was born ,
and the further suburbanization he facilitated has made life considerably
more pleasant for the city's middle classes. Their New York has not fallen, but
has only moved beyond the city limits , and from their perspective , Moses'
one-man planning was exemplary, for it created a relatively integrated park
and highway network that avoided some of the faults of piecemeal planning
in other cities.
Ofcourse, from the perspective of the New Yorkers then and now living
in the city, many of Moses' projects were a tragic mistake , for they need , not
the highways and Long Island parks Moses built but the housing he tore down
and the mass transit proposals he sabotaged. In addition, Moses hurt the city
by permitting bondholders and others to make unreasonable profits which are
still being paid out, and by his systematic assaults on the democratic process,
even though the protests these generated ultimately helped
to
bring about the
somewhat more democratic approach to public construction which now
prevails. Ironically , in the last chapter of his book, Caro begins to reconsider
his judgment ofMoses , wondering whether Moses ' ability to produce , even by
