Book Review: The Power Broker

January 22, 2025

The Power Broker is probably one of the largest books I have ever read. I suspect it's one of the largest books anyone has read, since it likely stretches the physical bounds of 'pages attachable to a book spine'. Spread across 1156 pages, the 700,000 tiny tiny words of The Power Broker measure up to:

• 200% the length of the entire The Lord of the Rings series
• a similar length to all six Dune books (including Frank's son's not-very-canon trilogy)
• 2/3 the length of the entire The Expanse series
• a little less than half the length of the 5 published A Song of Ice and Fire books

All in one nonfiction book. All about one person. Reality is dense!

Despite appearances, this is not a biography. It's actually an epic fantasy series that happens to be true. A young man grows with aspirations of grandeur, gets shot down as a young hopeful idealist, turns to the dark side for power, wins victories despite the odds, betrays his mentors, smashes the corrupt status quo, and replaces it with an entirely new, different, but also corrupt status quo. And that's just the first 400 pages! I haven't even gotten to the bits that discuss urbanism, racism, unjust evictions, and theatre.

Any American with a passing interest in cities ought to know the name 'Robert Moses'. Since The Power Broker launched, Moses' name has (d)evolved into a slur for greed, egotism, lack of accountability, elitism, and racism. When I lived in NYC, most of my friends hadn't read The Power Broker. But somehow most knew that Robert Moses was "that guy who built the parkway bridges too low for buses, to stop poor people from visiting Long Island parks".

Perhaps that legacy is a fair one for Robert Moses, if you're forced to summarize his 40+ years of public service in a single sentence. But if you, like me, hunger for more explanation of how, why, and when he did that, The Power Broker will more than satisfy your appetite.

I won't try to break down all 700,000 words for you here. Instead, I'll focus on some of my favorite highlights and facts from the book.

Flair

One thing that Moses did well? Flair! Whether he launched a park, a playground, a pool, a theatre, a beach, a highway, a bridge, or his personal nemesis: a tunnel, he made a big deal out of it. Politicians loved this, as one of the best ways to win yourself votes is NIPL (noticeably improving people’s lives). Most of us can learn from this in our lives and careers: when you sink hours upon hours in something, it's OK to celebrate it! If you, like me, have a tendency to be a bit meek about your accomplishments, remember that you really ought to occasionally put on the ego hat and show some pride in your work.

Of course, you must remember to remove the ego hat at some point. Preferably before you permanently hurt the lives of hundreds of thousands of strangers and chop deep scars in a city with your "Meat Axe".

Pettiness

Moses, of course, was born wearing the ego hat, and likely died wearing it. One side effect? Once he became powerful enough, his wrath became terrible, his retribution swift: whether you were a random secretary (not even employed by Moses!) who brought him bad news, a politician who refused to play ball, or a member of the press who asked an inconvenient question, he would not hesitate to crush you. If you were lucky, he'd just spread rumors that you were a Communist and hope that destroyed your career. If you weren't lucky, he'd get you fired or physically punch you.

Oh, and if you committed the sin of being his literal brother? He might do all of those things, blackball you from your industry and public service forever, and let you die penniless.

Lesson learned: Robert Moses was a jerk. Don't be a jerk.

Politicians are Children

This book humanizes American political figures in the strangest ways:

• FDR takes every opportunity he can to take revenge on someone he finds annoying
• NYC mayors are exposed for what they really are:
  • corrupt fools (O'Dwyer, Wagner)
  • helpless children (Impy)
• Al Smith was a total bro with nepotistic tendencies towards his singing and walking buddies

Biographies of all of these figures provide very different impressions of their character. But Robert Caro isn't a guy who makes shit up. So I'm forced to believe both sides: these politicians were very capable, but occasionally acted like complete children. And it seems that Robert Moses drew out the most childlike tendencies in mayors, governors, and even presidents.

How the Sausage Gets Made (Urban Highway Edition)

Caro's depiction of 'relocation' (honest term: eviction) to pave way for massive projects in NYC hit me particularly hard. In the abstract, I knew that moving (tens of) thousands of people to build a new highway was a messy business. It takes time. Plenty of people get screwed over, mostly the people in the most precarious situations. Some people wind up homeless.

But Caro's descriptions of the living situations forced upon people during the construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway legitimately gave me nightmares. You really need to read the entire chapter to fully understand, but one quote from Chapter 41: Rumors and the Report of Rumors ought to give you some small nightmares of your own:

Baby screamed; rat in crib.

If your interest has been piqued, check out Chapter 37: One Mile (and Chapter 38: One Mile: Afterward). You really need to read the full chapter to understand:

• the neighborhood character of East Tremont before the highway project
• the under- and heavy-handed way that Moses forced people out of their homes (even when they had nowhere else to go)
• the cruelty in Moses' refusal to consider any modifications to his highway plan to preserve homes and human connection (even when those modifications wouldn't cause any cascading problems in the project)
• the way that urban highways devastated neighborhoods well after the cacophony of construction ended

This is the emotional core of the book. If you've searched for an apartment in any American city, this will hit you hard.

Doing Things is Hard

Oddly, this is one area where the book builds empathy for Moses. I don't think that's an accident. Completing large scale projects in NYC is expensive, inconvenient, and necessitates compromise. When Moses started his public 'service' in the early 20th century, Tammany Hall corruption essentially ran New York State. Corruption, money, and power were tools of the political trade! And Moses largely mastered those tools.

Over and over again, the book reinforces that without the machinations of Moses, we wouldn't have a huge number of parks in Long Island, NYC, and even upstate. He is personally responsible for the vast majority of playgrounds in NYC. He renovated Central Park when it was full of garbage, bare dirt, and allegedly deformed sheep, adding baseball fields and paths and bathrooms. Without Moses, we certainly wouldn't have managed to build half the urban highways in NYC (and perhaps the rest of the country, since most other cities adopted the "Moses Method" at the height of his power).

Opportunity Cost

That last section might have you thinking that the world is better off thanks to Moses contributions. Parks are great! Playgrounds are great! Deformed sheep are scary! Highways kind of suck, but in a world where the automobile is the only way to get around, they are a necessity.

But regardless of how you feel about those various projects, Moses' true legacy isn't what he built. It's what he didn't build -- and what, by extension, nobody was able to build because Moses effectively controlled the largest sources of revenue in NYC and NY state from the early 1930s through the mid 1960s:

• subway extensions
• subway maintenance and facilities improvements
• light rail extensions
• light rail maintenance and facilities improvements
• tram extensions
• tram maintenance and facilities improvements
• playgrounds and parks in poor neighborhoods

Bad Things

OK, I might have lied a tiny bit in that last section. He also did some seriously bad things:

• he ripped up tram tracks and removing trams from NYC entirely
• he saddled the subway system with massive crushing debt, then deprived it of city and state support so even after he lost power, the subway had (still has) to dig itself out of a deep dark funding hole of interest and bonds and extricate itself from a nightmarish governing system
• he refused to add space for subway or light rail extension along NYC metro area highways, even in rural areas where the extra space was cheap and easy to come by, ensuring that generations would have no choice but to take an automobile to the airport and exurbs
• he refused to heat certain pools in public parks as a result of a strangely specific racist belief that dark-skinned people don't like cold water (seriously, who does?)

And then, y'know, the low bridges, the destroyed neighborhoods, the evictions, the misappropriation of city funds towards pet projects, the destruction of the last natural forest and last natural bog in NYC, the mental abuse of his employees and any city employees who got in his way, and Moses' (alleged) vampiric tendency to suck the will to live out of anyone with a soul who associated with him for more than a couple of years.

Losing the Plot

Even after he lost his power and positions, Moses couldn't understand why people hated him so much. Why? Because he lost touch. Nobody is all-powerful or all-knowing. We all have blind spots, biases, and make mistakes (logical and otherwise).

Contrast Moses with Abraham Lincoln, a man best known for revising his own racist beliefs. Whether you're the President of the United States, a powerful CEO, or a low-down dirty peasant individual contributor peon like myself, you need to be willing to a) admit you were wrong and b) learn from other people. Clearly you can get a lot done even if you aren't willing to do that. But if you want to do the best things, you need help.

Great Things -- Terrible, Yes, but Great

To quote a random Stack Exchanger, "The word 'great' is actually a lot closer to 'big' than it is to 'good'.".

Moses accomplished many great things. But they weren't necessarily good things. He's basically Voldemort.

You can Beat the Game; ...Should You?

Remember struggling to beat a video game for hours and hours as a kid, and getting stuck on a difficult level? I spent days stuck on certain bosses or puzzles. In many cases, I didn't figure them out until I came back to the game months or years later with a different perspective.

But I remember one case vividly. I was struggling with the Helm's Deep level in The Battle for Middle Earth. Time and time again, I couldn't defend the Deeping Wall, I'd lose a giant chunk of my army and heroes, and Saruman's Uruk-Hai would wind up slaughtering my peasants and destroying the castle. I lost, time and time again. Eventually I wound up editing the game file to get myself past that level.

But that playthrough was permanently ruined. I kept playing for a bit, but it wasn't really my army that beat Helm's Deep. I just didn't care any more. Ultimately, I started a new game, and went back to beat Helm's Deep legitimately.

Similarly, I once ran a Minecraft server for some friends. We played survival, built some cool structures, and mined for all of our resources, splitting up tasks to acquire cobblestone, wood, sand, clay, and more to build our base. Every resource we needed was an adventure of itself. We optimised paths through the Nether to get to the desert or ocean faster. We created a water elevator down to the ideal level for diamond mining, and designed an approach to mining at that level to optimise the amount of diamonds we could find in any given hour in the space we had. We created farms for high XP enemies so we could continually gamble on the best enchantments for our gear, and keep it from ever degrading and needing replacement. We created a set of special pickaxes with the Silk Touch enchantment so we could mine "clean stone" instead of cobblestone for building projects that demanded a more concrete look.

But one day I decided I wanted to build something out of obsidian, a material that's awfully tedious to mine. But I didn't want to spend all day mining that obsidian. So I gave myself a bunch of stacks of obsidian using the server console. Then I built my wizard tower.

That day, I lost my interest in the server. I ultimately destroyed the structure (manually) and revived the server months later. But the magic was gone.

Robert Moses built a sprawling, self-sustaining power structure across at least 13 authorities and government positions in New York state and City government over 45 years in public service. He found a true "hack" to fund and plan his goals: the public authority, an entity somewhere in between a government and a corporation, capable of selling effectively infinite tax-free bonds to leverage bridge toll revenue into hundreds of millions of dollars of government projects.

At the time, I'm sure Moses thought he was doing the right thing: cutting out the corrupt politicians, the NIMBYs, the graft, and the meddlers who pushed for favors. In control of the Triborough Authority, he could finally focus on his projects without all of those distractions!

But as aggravating and motivation-destroying as those distractions can be, they represent democracy. The will of the people. Those distractions are the (admittedly imperfect) way that the people have a voice in our government.

The day that Robert Moses made himself immune to those distractions, he walled himself off from democracy and the will of the people. Like the fabled BDFL (benevolent dictator for life) in software, public projects became the product of one mind alone: Moses'.

But no human being is all-knowing. Any single person needs those distractions to keep them on the right course.

Just like how when I played those video games, the fun wasn't the end state, where the thing was built and I got to look at it, or the boss or level was defeated. The fun was in the adventure to get those resources and the struggle to beat the hard thing, and the memories I made and the things I learned to get there.

50 Years Later

The Power Broker debuted in 1974, now 50 years past. At the time, Moses' legacy was apparent in NYC in a truly dark time for the city, when crime ran amok. The subways were covered in graffiti. Times Square exposed more flesh than the Naked Cowboy. The murder rate was an awful lot higher than it is today. At the time, it was tempting to lay blame for many of those problems at the feet of Robert Moses.

Today, after 20 years of safety and prosperity in NYC, it's not as tempting to blame Moses for quite as many of those social ills. But it is easier in hindsight to see how Moses steered the city for the last century:

• The neighborhoods of the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn will forever bear the scars of Moses' highways. Chopped up by Moses' "Meat Axe", neighborhoods, families, and friends never quite recovered. But the scars are starting to heal. Upstate, in Syracuse and Buffalo, Moses-inspired urban highways are being removed from city centers. The West Side Improvement has been improved some more. The urban blight that so devastated the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn has eased.
• Despite having the best public transit in the entire nation and remarkable walking-friendly density, NYC is still completely full of cars. Congestion pricing in the absolute heart of that city -- south of 60th in Manhattan -- was an is a controversial struggle. It will likely be rolled back due to federal meddling within days of this post.
• The subway stopped expanding in the 30s. A century later, we've spent literal billions to create perhaps one mile of total new subway. We also spent billions to create the AirTrain to JFK, which costs more than the subway and isn't even a part of the same system. The outer boroughs, including all of Staten Island, are completely omitted from the subway system. Building a new line on existing track to connect Queens and Brooklyn is controversial and will take decades if it ever gets built. There are no rail tracks whatsoever that go to LGA, only relatively inconvenient buses, even after spending billions to 'upgrade' the airport. The one proposal by yet-another-corrupt politician to connect LGA to the light rail network was so dumb, even train lovers couldn't endorse it. No politician has yet given the N extension through North Astoria or down Grand Central Parkway enough credit to prove itself.
• The subway has continued to defer basic maintenance since the 30s, and our corrupt egotistical government wasted our last big chance to fix it.
• Most importantly, for most residents of New Jersey, Long Island, Connecticut, and the Hudson River Valley, you need a car to visit NYC. Even if it's just to drive to light rail or a bus stop. That's a direct result of Moses' decision to prioritise highways over any other method of transportation. Even though highways scale poorly, don't support the throughput needed for the NYC metro area, and there's no good place to dump tens of millions of vehicles in NYC's downtown areas where people commute for work. As long as NYC and its surrounding suburbs don't work together to improve transportation (read: prioritise high-throughput modes like trains, buses, bikes, and yes, walking with your feet), car dependence will limit NYC (and the lungs of the people who live there).

There's plenty of other takeaways from this book. But these are mine. If the NYC metro area or America's car dependence interest you, I recommend no book higher than this one. The writing is clear. The story is compelling. The book is heavy, and will start conversations at coffee shops. There's also an ebook now.

Book Club

If you enjoy book clubs or discussions and none of your friends are willing to read this enormous tome, I couldn't recommend 99 Percent Invisible's Breakdown: The Power Broker. The podcast itself is fantastic, but this series is particularly good. Each episode breaks down The Power Broker into one of 12 (relatively) bite-sized pieces, discusses that section, and features a guest discussion related to the broad strokes. The hosts are intelligent and occasionally quite funny. The guests provide extra context. It's very close to what college literature seminars were supposed to be, and reminds me a lot of a previous 'online book club', the Malazan Reread of the Fallen.