Rethinking Robert Moses

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Photograph by C. M. Spieglitz, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division (LC-USZ62-13079)

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Brochure cover, November 12, 1959
Robert Moses and the Modern City exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York

In the August/Septmber 2002 issue of Metropolis, writer Phillip Lopate wrote a revisionist essay on the works of Robert Moses. Rather than portray Moses as power hungry and short-sighted of the needs of the people, Lopate writes that Moses “was one of the greatest heroes of the twentieth century, and one of our greatest Americans.”

Lopate’s essay was no doubt an inspiration for, Robert Moses and the Modern City, an exhibit that examines the city planner and is currently on display at three musems throught New York—Queens Museum of Art, the Museum of the City of New York, and Wallach Art Galleryof Columbia University.

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I am struck by the fact that whenever people from all walks of life—stockbrokers, leftist English professors, artists, bankers, carpenters—talk to me about New York City, they knowingly trace its problems back to Robert Moses. There exists a startling consensus that Moses was a monster, the enemy of the good. This Manichean tale—how Moses ruined, or tried to ruin, New York—has indeed become the city’s postwar master narrative, our Romulus and Remus myth. The last episodes of Ric Burns’s PBS documentary on New York, for example, regurgitated it whole. It has proven extraordinarily useful, as master narratives often are, and has only two drawbacks: 1) it may not be true—or true anywhere near the extent people believe; 2) it prevents us from interpreting New York’s history with accuracy and nuance, not to mention developing more sophisticated narratives that might better suit our planning for the city’s future.

Fonte: Metropolis Mag