Sick City - Longreads

Writer Katie Mulkowsky’s father grew up in Robert Moses’s New York City—specifically, the Bronx that Moses all but destroyed in his quest to remake the metropolis in his image. Now an urban planner, Mulkowsky considers how Moses shaped both her dad’s life and her own: We lost my dad last year: the denouement in a courageously fought cancer battle that spanned more than two decades. I was 24 when he died—not as young as I could have been, but not old enough to negate a dull, almost-always-there sense of missing something. He was unpretentious, unfashionable, unfailingly reliable. He was corny and funny and sentimental. He was a rare combination of impossibly hard-working and deeply empathetic: a respiratory therapist for many years, he was an asthmatic who helped people breathe. We won’t ever be able to say for certain whether his lifelong lung issues, and lengthy scrimmage with the carcinomas, were caused by his exposure to harmful pollutants alone. But we’d be foolish to say that the

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• James Hennessy